about five o'clock
Visitors went downstairs to get to Mr. Barlow 's ground-floor , for the influence of time and advancing civilisation had raised the pathway in front of Mr. Barlow 's cottage until his parlour had become of a cellar-like aspect . Yet it was a very nice little parlour when one got down to it , and it enjoyed winter and summer a perpetual twilight , since the light that crept through the leaded casement was tempered by a screen of flowerpots , which were old Barlow 's particular care . There were no finer geraniums in all Grasmere than Barlow 's , no bigger carnations or picotees , asters or arums . It was about five o'clock in the March afternoon , when Mary ushered John Hammond into Mr. Barlow 's dwelling , and , in the dim glow of a cheery little fire and the faint light that filtered through the screen of geranium leaves , the visitor looked for a moment or so doubtfully at the owner of the cottage . But only for a moment . Those bright blue eyes and apple cheeks , that benevolent expression , bore no likeness to the strange old man he had seen on the Fell . Mr. Barlow was toothless and nut-cracker like of outline ; he was thin and shrunken , and bent with the burden of long years , but his healthy visage had none of those deep lines , those cross markings and hollows which made the pallid countenance of that other old man as ghastly as would be the abstract idea of life 's last stage embodied by the bitter pencil of a Hogarth .