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?