At the side of the house a new bow window, modest enough in dimensions and make, had been thrown out on to another close-shaven piece of lawn, and by its suggestion of a distant sophisticated order of things disturbed the homely impression left by the untouched ivy-grown walls, the unpretending porch, and wide slate-window sills of the front.

And evidently the line of sheds standing level with the dwelling-house no longer sheltered the animals, the carts, or the tools which make the small capital of a Westmoreland farmer.

The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted and closely shut; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves in what had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to a narrow gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single footmark.
No, evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly was, had been but lately, or comparatively lately, transformed to new and softer uses; that rough patriarchal life of which it had once been a symbol and centre no longer bustled and clattered through it.

It had become the shelter of new ideals, the home of another and a milder race than once possessed it.
In a stranger coming upon the house for the first time, on this particular evening, the sense of a changing social order and a vanishing past produced by the slight but significant modifications it had undergone, would have been greatly quickened by certain sounds which were streaming out on to the evening air from one of the divisions of that long one-storied addition to the main dwelling we have already described.

Some indefatigable musician inside was practising the violin with surprising energy and vigor, and within the little garden the distant murmur of the river and the gentle breathing of the West wind round the fell were entirely conquered and banished by these triumphant shakes and turns, or by the flourishes and the broad _cantabile_ passages of one of Spohr's Andantes.