Strange contrast, you may have thought, between the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplace houses, which in their best days were but the sign of a sordid life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era, and the effect produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps that they seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain-pine; nay, even in the day when they were built they must hav
" Rounding a bend in the river, they came in sight of a handsome, dignified old house of mellowed red brick, with well-kept lawns reaching down to the water's edge.
" Something like a reluctant smile, rather rusty from long disuse, mellowed Marilla's grim expression.
When, after due consultation with my head, the true heart speaks, it is the finest and most mellowed judgment that I, human creature, am capable of.
The years have mellowed me.
