Chapter Two.
A Chip of the Old Block.
It was no part of Squire Broadbent’s plan to turn away old and faithful servants. He had to weed them though, and this meant thinning out to such an extent that not over many were left.
The young and healthy creatures of inutility had to shift; but the very old, the decrepit—those who had become stiff and grey in his uncle’s service—were pensioned off. They were to stay for the rest of their lives in the rural village adown the glen—bask in the sun in summer, sit by the fire of a winter, and talk of the times when “t’old Squire was aboot.”
The servants settled with, and fresh ones with suitable “go” in them established in their place, the live stock came in for reformation.
“Saint Mary! what a medley!” exclaimed the Squire, as he walked through the byres and stables, and past the styes. “Everything bred anyhow. No method in my uncle’s madness. No rules followed, no type. Why the quickest plan will be to put them all to the hammer.”
This was cutting the Gordian-knot with a vengeance, but it was perhaps best in the long run.
Next came renovation of the farm-steading itself; pulling down and building, enlarging, and what not, and while this was going on, the land itself was not being forgotten. Fences were levelled and carted away, and newer and airier ones put up, and for the most part three and sometimes even five fields were opened into one. There were woods also to be seen to. The new Squire liked woods, but the trees in some of these were positively poisoning each other. Here was a larch-wood, for instance—those logs with the long, grey lichens on them are part of some of the trees. So closely do the larches grow together, so white with moss, so stunted and old-looking, that it would have made a merry-andrew melancholy to walk among them. What good were they? Down they must come, and down they had come; and after the ground had been stirred up a bit, and left for a summer to let the sunshine and air into it, all the hill was replanted with young, green, smiling pines, larches, and spruces, and that was assuredly an improvement. In a few years the trees were well advanced; grass and primroses grew where the moss had crept about, and the wood in spring was alive with the song of birds.
The mansion-house had been left intact. Nothing could have added much to the beauty of that. It stood high up on a knoll, with rising park-like fields behind, and at some considerable distance the blue slate roofs of the farm-steading peeping up through the greenery of the trees. A solid yellow-grey house, with sturdy porch before the hall door, and sturdy mullioned windows, one wing ivy-clad, a broad sweep of gravel in front, and beyond that, lawns and terraces, and flower and rose gardens. And the whole overlooked a river or stream, that went winding away clear and silvery till it lost itself in wooded glens.