"I sha'n't change; an' if I did to all the world else, 'twouldn't be to you, mother. You knaw that, I reckon. I'm hopeful; I'm more; I'm 'bout as certain of fair fortune as a man can be. Venwell rights[6] be mine, and theer's no better moorland grazing than round these paarts. The farm-land looks a bit foul, along o' being let go to rack, but us'll soon have that clean again, an' some gude stuff into it, tu. My awn work'll be staring me in the faace before summer; an' by the time Phoebe do come to be mistress, nobody'll knaw Newtake, I promise 'e." [6] _Venwell rights_ = Venville rights. Mrs. Blanchard viewed with some uneasiness the spectacle of valley-born and valley-nurtured Phoebe taking up her abode on the high lands. For herself she loved them well, and the Moor possessed no terrors for her; but she had wit to guess that her daughter-in-law would think and feel differently. Indeed, neither woman nor man might reasonably be blamed for viewing the farm without delight when first brought within the radius of its influence. Newtake stood, a squat and unlovely erection, under a tar-pitched roof of slate. Its stone walls were coated with a stucco composition, which included tallow as an ingredient and ensured remarkable warmth and dryness. Before its face there stretched a winding road of white flint, that climbed from the village, five miles distant, and soon vanished amid the undulations of the hills; while, opposite, steep heathery slopes and grassy coombs ascended abruptly to masses of weathered granite; and at the rear a hillside, whereon Metherill's scattered hut-circles made incursions even into the fields of the farm, fell to the banks of Southern Teign where she babbled between banks of brake-fern and heather. Swelling and sinking solemnly along the sky, Dartmoor surrounded Newtake. At the entrance of the yard stood a broken five-barred gate between twin masses of granite; then appeared a ragged outbuilding or two, with roofs of lichen-covered slate; and upon one side, in a row, grew three sycamores, bent out of all uprightness by years of western winds, and coated as to their trunks with grey lichen. Behind a cowyard of shattered stone pavement and cracked mud stood the farm itself, and around it extended the fields belonging thereto. They were six or seven in number, and embraced some five-and-fifty acres of land, mostly indifferent meadow.