In these bare green valleys there is a sort of delicate austerity even in the summer; the memory of winter seems to be still lingering about these wind-swept fells, about the farm-houses, with their rough serviceable walls, of the same stone as the crags behind them, and the ravines in which the shrunken brooks trickle musically down through the _debris_ of innumerable Decembers.
The country is blithe, but soberly blithe.

Nature shows herself delightful to man, but there is nothing absorbing or intoxicating about her.

Man is still well able to defend himself against her, to live his own independent life of labor and of will, and to develop that tenacity of hidden feeling, that slowly growing intensity of purpose which is so often wiled out of him by the spells of the South.
The distant aspect of Burwood Farm differed in nothing from that of the few other farmhouses which dotted the fells or clustered beside the river between it and the rocky end of the valley.

But as one came nearer certain signs of difference became visible.

The garden, instead of being the old-fashioned medley of phloxes, lavender bushes, monthly roses, gooseberry trees, herbs, and pampas grass, with which the farmers' wives of Long Whindale loved to fill their little front enclosures, was trimly laid down in turf dotted with neat flowerbeds, full at the moment we are writing of with orderly patches of scarlet and purple anemones, wallflowers, and pansies.