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.
The scenery was really beautiful all round, and in some parts even wild; while the distant views of the Cheviot Hills lent a charm to everything.
There was something else held sacred by the Squire as well as the habitable mansion, and that was Burley Old Castle. Undoubtedly a fortress of considerable strength it had been in bygone days, when the wild Scots used to come raiding here, but there was no name for it now save that of a "ruin." The great north tower still stood firm and bold, and three walls of the lordly hall, its floor green with long, rank grass; the walls themselves partly covered with ivy, with broom growing on the top, which was broad enough for the half-wild goats to scamper along.
There was also the donjon keep, and the remains of a fosse; but all the rest of this feudal castle had been unceremoniously carted away, to erect cowsheds and pigstyes with it.
"So sinks the pride of former days,
When glory's thrill is o'er."
No, Squire Broadbent did not interfere with the castle; he left it to the goats and to Archie, who took to it as a favourite resort from the time he could crawl.
But these—all these—new-fangled notions the neighbouring squires and farmers bold could easily have forgiven, had Broadbent not carried his craze for machinery to the very verge of folly. So they thought. Such things might be all very well in America, but they were not called for here. Extraordinary mills driven by steam, no less wonderful-looking harrows, uncanny-like drags and drilling machines, sowing and reaping machines that were fearfully and wonderfully made, and ploughs that, like the mills, were worked by steam.
Terrible inventions these; and even the men that were connected with them had to be brought from the far South, and did not talk a homely, wholesome lingua, nor live in a homely, wholesome way.
His neighbours confessed that his crops were heavier, and the cereals and roots finer; but they said to each other knowingly, "What about the expense of down-put?" And as far as their own fields went, the plough-boy still whistled to and from his work.