Behind and on either side of Ivescar rose the fells--steep slopes of grass and scree, carrying up to the white precipices that hemmed the little valley in. High above these again, but out of sight, rose the mass of the great mountains, each standing on its plinth of limestone. Here and there the line of a wall betrayed the existence of humanity, but otherwise, except for the house in its artificial wood, with its artificial lawn and lake, the landscape utterly ignored the world of men. It was grand, primeval, solitary, remote from all the small mortal concerns of life. As it had been since the dawn of history, so it remained to-day. Peoples had come and gone, dynasties towered and crashed; but the little glen under the shadow of the Simonstone had wrought out its own fate untroubled by the clatter and tinkle of collapsing empires. Silent and serene as it stood, the finger of man had never scarred its tranquillity, the voice of man had never broken into the current of its dream. And yet, in the midst of this immortal solitude, the fancy of a rich manufacturer had planted this insolent mushroom of a house, this brazen assertion of a fact which the hills had always chosen to ignore, though Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norman had vainly striven to enforce it on their consciousness, as they fought out their ephemeral fights across the flanks of Ravensber, or made their settlement on the flat crown of the Simonstone. The valley and the mountains had taken their unruffled course. Had the house been less clamorous, the assault on their notice less insistent, they might in time have come to assimilate the signs and the presence of man. A quieter dwelling might insensibly have melted into their scheme, have been merged into the vast individuality of the hills. But Ivescar was too flaunting, too blatant, too eternally new. It compelled attention, was an unceasing penny-whistle across the great harmony of silence. And so, unable to make Ivescar one with themselves, the mountains took the only other course, refusing all compromise, and forced the incongruity of the building upon the world’s notice, by the blank contempt with which they ignored it. Their unnoticing disdain made its yellow stones, its pretentious tower appear even more undignified than ever, emphasizing every detail of their parvenu richness, their uneasy vulgarity. Man at Brakelond was the dominant note of Castle and country; here the note was an isolated discord. Man was nothing, his works an offence, amid the enormous loneliness of the fells.