nville rights.

Mrs. Blanchard viewed with some uneasiness the spectacle of valley-born
and valley-nurtured Phoebe taking up her abode on the high lands. For
herself she loved them well, and the Moor possessed no terrors for her;
but she had wit to guess that her daughter-in-law would think and feel
differently. Indeed, neither woman nor man might reasonably be blamed
for viewing the farm without delight when first brought within the
radius of its influence.

Newtake stood, a squat and unlovely erection, under a tar-pitched roof
of slate. Its stone walls were coated with a stucco composition, which
included tallow as an ingredient and ensured remarkable warmth and
dryness. Before its face there stretched a winding road of white flint,
that climbed from the village, five miles distant, and soon vanished
amid the undulations of the hills; while, opposite, steep heathery
slopes and grassy coombs ascended abruptly to masses of weathered
granite; and at the rear a hillside, whereon Metherill's scattered
hut-circles made incursions even into the fields of the farm, fell to
the banks of Southern Teign where she babbled between banks of
brake-fern and heather. Swelling and sinking solemnly along the sky,
Dartmoor surrounded Newtake. At the entrance of the yard stood a broken
five-barred gate between twin masses of granite; then appeared a ragged
outbuilding or two, with roofs of lichen-covered slate; and upon one
side, in a row, grew three sycamores, bent out of all uprightness by
years of western winds, and coated as to their trunks with grey lichen.
Behind a cowyard of shattered stone pavement and cracked mud stood the
farm itself, and around it extended the fields belonging thereto. They
were six or seven in number, and embraced some five-and-fifty acres of
land, mostly indifferent meadow.

Seen from the winding road, or from the bird's-eye elevation of the
adjacent tor, Newtake, with its mean ship-pens and sties, outbuildings
and little crofts, all huddled together, poverty-stricken, time-fretted,
wind-worn, and sad of colour, appeared a mere forlorn fragment of
civilisation left derelict upon the savage bosom of an untamable land.
It might have represented some forsaken, night-foundered abode of men,
torn by earthquake or magic spell from a region wholly different, and
dropped and stranded here. It sulked solitary, remote, and forgotten;
its black roof frowned over its windows, and green tears, dribbling down
its wall