plentiful in their season.

Upon a natural terrace in such a slope to the south, stood Castle
Warlock. But it turned no smiling face to the region whence came
the warmth and the growth. A more grim, repellant, unlovely
building would be hard to find; and yet, from its extreme
simplicity, its utter indifference to its own looks, its repose,
its weight, and its gray historical consciousness, no one who loved
houses would have thought of calling it ugly. It was like the
hard-featured face of a Scotch matron, suggesting no end of story,
of life, of character: she holds a defensive if not defiant face to
the world, but within she is warm, tending carefully the fires of
life. Summer and winter the chimneys of that desolate-looking house
smoked; for though the country was inclement, and the people that
lived in it were poor, the great, sullen, almost unhappy-looking
hills held clasped to their bare cold bosoms, exposed to all the
bitterness of freezing winds and summer hail, the warmth of
household centuries: their peat-bogs were the store-closets and
wine-cellars of the sun, for the hoarded elixir of physical life.
And although the walls of the castle, as it was called, were so
thick that in winter they kept the warmth generated within them
from wandering out and being lost on the awful wastes of homeless
hillside and moor, they also prevented the brief summer heat of the
wayfaring sun from entering with freedom, and hence the fires were
needful in the summer days as well--at least at the time my story
commences, for then, as generally, there were elderly and aged
people in the house, who had to help their souls to keep their
bodies warm.

The house was very old. It had been built for more kinds of shelter