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They had just passed through a little wood; and in its friendly gloom, he had put his arm round his wife so that they had lingered a little, loth to leave its shelter. But now they had emerged again upon the radiance of the fell-side, and he had found a stone for Nelly to rest on.

They were flung on the fell-side through a score of acres, in sheets and tapestries of gold, such an audacious, unreckoned plenty as went strangely with the frugal air and temper of the northern country, with the bare walled fields, the ruggedness of the crags above, and the melancholy of the treeless marsh below.

Oh! how I sit and think of it sometimes, when life seems to be going crookedly, that rock on the fell-side where I found you, and caught you, and snared you, my dove, for ever.

In front, a whitewashed porch, and a narrow garden-plot, enclosed by a low iron railing, were dimly discernible: behind, the steep fell-side loomed like a monstrous, mysterious curtain hung across the night. He passed round the back into the twilight of a wide yard, cobbled and partially grass-grown, vaguely flanked by the shadowy outlines of long, low farm-buildings.

There Castus pointed out to Hadrian the track of Dere Street the road of Agricola that seemed to flutter like some white butterfly up the distant and opposite fell-side crowned by the Wannys' heights birthplace of the river Wansbeck. 'That track, sire, leads to Habitancum, Bremenium, Ad Fines, and Trimontium beside Tweed, said Castus.

A square stone house of eight rooms, set on a bleak fell-side where the sun never shone, where no fruits ripened, no flowers bloomed and no trees grew, save here and there a dwarfed and twisted thorn covered with pale gray lichen and bent by the wind into painful deformity of growth a house which had no garden, only a strip of rank, coarse grass before the windows, with a potato-patch and kail-yard to the side; where was no adornment within or without, no beauty of color, no softness of line, merely a rugged, lonesome, square stone tent set up on a mountain-spur, as it would seem for the express reception of tortured penitents not seeking to soften sorrow, this was Windy Brow, the patrimony of the Gryces, where Keziah, Emmanuel's eldest sister, lived and had lived these sixty years and more.

The hawthorns too were white upon the fell-side, beside the ageing gold of the gorse, while below, the lake lay like roughened silver in its mountain cup, and on the sides of Nab Scar, below the screes, the bronze of the oaks ran in and out among the feathery green of the larch plantations, or the flowering grass of the hay-meadows dropping to the lake.

The summer weather held, and every tree and fell-side stood bathed in a warm haze, suffused with the declining light. All round, encircling fells in a purple shadow; to the north and east, great slopes appearing Helvellyn, Grisedale, Fairfield. They walked hand in hand where the path admitted almost silent passionately conscious of each other and of the beauty round them.

The squalid farmyard, the bare fell-side beyond it, the distant levels of the marsh, had taken to themselves a cold forbidding air. Laura again imagined it in December a waste of snow, with the farm making an ugly spot upon the white, and the little black-bearded sheep she could see feeding on the fell, crowding under the rocks for shelter. But this time she shivered. All the spell was broken.

"Snakes, Rover, doesta see t' snakes," he would mutter, as his eye caught the serpent-like advance of the walls. The dog seemed to catch his meaning, and responded with a low growl of sympathy. "Aye, they're snakes," the old man went on, "crawlin's up t' fell-side on their bellies an' lickin' up t' dust.