"Not I; I only wonder you did not bring them all." "That's very good-natured of you, Sir Bale, but all could not come at _one_ bout; there are--tell him, Martin--ha, ha, ha! there are eleven." "It must be very cheerful down at the vicarage," said Sir Bale graciously; and turning to the vicar he added, "But how unequally blessings are divided! You have eleven, and I not one--that I'm aware of." "And then, in that direction straight before you, you have the lake, and then the fells; and five miles from the foot of the mountain at the other side, before you reach Fottrell--and that is twenty-five miles by the road----" "Dear me! how far apart they are set! My gardener told me this morning that asparagus grows very thinly in this part of the world. How thinly clergymen grow also down here--in one sense," he added politely, for the vicar was stout. "We were looking out of the window--we amused ourselves that way before you came--and your view is certainly the very best anywhere round this side; your view of the lake and the fells--what mountains they are, Sir Bale!" "'Pon my soul, they are! I wish I could blow them asunder with a charge of duck-shot, and I shouldn't be stifled by them long. But I suppose, as we can't get rid of them, the next best thing is to admire them. We are pretty well married to them, and there is no use in quarrelling." "I know you don't think so, Sir Bale, ha, ha, ha! You wouldn't take a good deal and spoil Mardykes Hall." "You can't get a mouthful or air, or see the sun of a morning, for those frightful mountains," he said with a peevish frown at them. "Well, the lake at all events--that you _must_ admire, Sir Bale?" "No ma'am, I don't admire the lake. I'd drain the lake if I could--I hate the lake. There's nothing so gloomy as a lake pent up among barren mountains. I can't conceive what possessed my people to build our house down here, at the edge of a lake; unless it was the fish, and precious fish it is--pike! I don't know how people digest it--_I_ can't. I'd as soon think of eating a watchman's pike." "I thought that having travelled so much abroad, you would have acquired a great liking for that kind of scenery, Sir Bale; there is a great deal of it on the Continent, ain't there?" said Mrs. Bedel. "And the boating." "Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don't you think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part I hate boating, and I hate the water; and I'd rather have my house, like Haworth, at the edge of a moss, with good wholesome peat to look at, and an open horizon--savage and stupid and bleak as all that is--than be suffocated among impassable mountains, or upset in a black lake and drowned like a kitten. O, there's luncheon in the next room; won't you take some?" CHAPTER V Mrs. Julaper's Room