The small, whitewashed house—­on this May day, more than a generation ago—­stood on a narrow shelf that juts out from the face of one of the eastern fells, bounding the valley of Great Langdale.

When Phoebe, seeing no one on the road, turned to look how near the sun might be to its setting, she saw it, as Wordsworth saw it of old, dropping between the peaks of those ‘twin brethren’ which to the northwest close in the green bareness of the vale.  Between the two pikes the blaze lingered, enthroned; the far winding of the valley, hemmed in also by blue and craggy fells, was pierced by rays of sunset; on the broad side of the pikes the stream of Dungeon Ghyll shone full-fed and white; the sheep, with their new-born lambs beside them, studded the green pastures of the valley; and sounds of water came from the fell-sides.  Everywhere lines of broad and flowing harmony, moulded by some subtle union of rock and climate and immemorial age into a mountain beauty which is the peculiar possession of Westmoreland and Cumberland.  Neither awful, nor yet trivial; neither too soft for dignity, nor too rugged for delight.  The Westmoreland hills are the remains of an infinitely older world—­giants decayed, but of a great race and ancestry; they have the finish, the delicate or noble loveliness—­one might almost say the manner—­that comes of long and gentle companionship with those chief forces that make for natural beauty, with air and water, with temperate suns and too abundant rains.  Beside them the Alps are inhuman; the Apennines mere forest-grown heaps—­mountains in the making; while all that Scotland gains from the easy enveloping glory of its heather, Westmoreland, which is almost heatherless, must owe to an infinitude of fine strokes, tints, curves, and groupings, to touches of magic and to lines of grace, yet never losing the wild energy of precipice and rock that belongs of right to a mountain world.

To-day Langdale was in spring.  The withered fern was still red on the sides of the pikes; there was not a leaf on the oaks, still less on the ashes; but the larches were green in various plantations, and the sycamores were bursting.  Half a mile eastward the woods were all in soft bloom, carpeted with windflowers and bluebells.  Here, but for the larches, and the few sycamores and yews that guard each lonely farm, all was naked fell and pasture.  The harsh spring wind came rioting up the valley, to fling itself on the broad sides of the pikes; the lambs made a sad bleating; the water murmured in the ghyll beyond the house; the very sunshine was clear and cold.

Calculations quick and anxious passed through the young wife’s brain.  Debts here, and debts there; the scanty list of small commissions ahead, which she knew by heart; the uncertainty of the year before them; clothes urgently wanted for the child, for John, for herself.  She drew a long and harassed breath.