These relatives still lived where his boyhood had been passed, a life strangely unlike his own, and even alien to his sympathies, but their house was still all that he could call home.

Was it to be always the same?
Fifteen years now, since, at the age of twenty, he painted his first considerable landscape, a tract of moorland on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

This was his native ground.

At Sowerby Bridge, a manufacturing town, which, like many others in the same part of England, makes a blot of ugliness on country in itself sternly beautiful, his father had settled as the manager of certain rope-works.
Mr.Mallard's state was not unprosperous, for he had invented a process put in use by his employers, and derived benefit from it.

He was a man of habitual gravity, occasionally severe in the rule of his household, very seldom unbending to mirth.