CHAPTER II


FOX HOW


The gray-stone house stands now, as it stood then, on a "how" or rising
ground in the beautiful Westmorland valley leading from Ambleside to
Rydal. The "Doctor" built it as a holiday paradise for himself and his
children, in the year 1833. It is a modest building, with ten bedrooms
and three sitting-rooms. Its windows look straight into the heart of
Fairfield, the beautiful semicircular mountain which rears its hollowed
front and buttressing scaurs against the north, far above the green
floor of the valley. That the house looked north never troubled my
grandfather or his children. What they cared for was the perfect outline
of the mountain wall, the "pensive glooms," hovering in that deep breast
of Fairfield, the magic never-ending chase of sunlight and cloud across
it on fine days, and the beauty of the soft woodland clothing its base.
The garden was his children's joy as it became mine. Its little beck
with its mimic bridges, its encircling river, its rocky knolls, its wild
strawberries and wild raspberries, its queen of birch-trees rearing a
stately head against the distant mountain, its rhododendrons growing
like weeds on its mossy banks, its velvet turf, and long silky grass in
the parts left wild--all these things have made the joy of three
generations.