After A Shadow and Other Stories | Page 7

on, in their grand airy procession over the
gladsome blue sky! It was a hilly road, and I begged the lad who drove
us not to press the horse; so we were nearly an hour, at our slow rate of
going, before we drew up at the gate of Appletreewick.
24th February to 2d March.--We have now been here long enough to
know something of the place and the people. First, as to the place:
Where the farmhouse now is, there was once a famous priory. The
tower is still standing, and the great room where the monks ate and
drank--used at present as a granary. The house itself seems to have
been tacked on to the ruins anyhow. No two rooms in it are on the same
level. The children do nothing but tumble about the passages, because
there always happens to be a step up or down, just at the darkest part of
every one of them. As for staircases, there seems to me to be one for
each bedroom. I do nothing but lose my way--and the farmer says,
drolling, that he must have sign-posts put up for me in every corner of
the house from top to bottom. On the ground-floor, besides the usual
domestic offices, we have the best parlor--a dark, airless, expensively
furnished solitude, never invaded by anybody; the kitchen, and a kind
of hall, with a fireplace as big as the drawing-room at our town
lodgings. Here we live and take our meals; here the children can racket
about to their hearts' content; here the dogs come lumbering in,

whenever they can get loose; here wages are paid, visitors are received,
bacon is cured, cheese is tasted, pipes are smoked, and naps are taken
every evening by the male members of the family. Never was such a
comfortable, friendly dwelling-place devised as this hall; I feel already
as if half my life had been passed in it.
Out-of-doors, looking beyond the flower-garden, lawn, back yards,
pigeon-houses, and kitchen-gardens, we are surrounded by a network of
smooth grazing-fields, each shut off from the other by its neat
hedgerow and its sturdy gate. Beyond the fields the hills seem to flow
away gently from us into the far blue distance, till they are lost in the
bright softness of the sky. At one point, which we can see from our
bedroom windows, they dip suddenly into the plain, and show, over the
rich marshy flat, a strip of distant sea--a strip sometimes blue,
sometimes gray; sometimes, when the sun sets, a streak of fire;
sometimes, on showery days, a flash of silver light.
The inhabitants of the farmhouse have one great and rare merit--they
are people whom you can make friends with at once. Between not
knowing them at all, and knowing them well enough to shake hands at
first sight, there is no ceremonious interval or formal gradation
whatever. They received us, on our arrival, exactly as if we were old
friends returned from some long traveling expedition. Before we had
been ten minutes in the hall, William had the easiest chair and the
snuggest corner; the children were eating bread-and-jam on the
window-seat; and I was talking to the farmer's wife, with the cat on my
lap, of the time when Emily had the measles.
The family numbers seven, exclusive of the indoor servants, of course.
First came the farmer and his wife--he is a tall, sturdy, loud-voiced,
active old man--she the easiest, plumpest and gayest woman of sixty I
ever met with. They have three sons and two daughters. The two eldest
of the young men are employed on the farm; the third is a sailor, and is
making holiday-time of it just now at Appletreewick. The daughters are
pictures of health and freshness. I have but one complaint to make
against them--they are beginning to spoil the children already.
In this tranquil place, and among these genial, natural people, how

happily my time might be passed, were it not for the saddening sight of
William's affliction, and the wearing uncertainty of how we are to
provide for future necessities! It is a hard thing for my husband and me,
after having had the day made pleasant by kind words and friendly
offices, to feel this one anxious thought always forcing itself on us at
night: Shall we have the means of stopping in our new home in a
month's time?
3d.--A rainy day; the children difficult to manage; William miserably
despondent. Perhaps he influenced me, or perhaps I felt my little
troubles with the children more than usual: but, however it was, I have
not been so heavy-hearted since the day when my husband first put on
the green shade. A listless, hopeless sensation would steal over me; but
why write about it?