FIVE YEARS OF IT.

CHAPTER I.

"O blest retirement!"-GOLDSMITH.

THEY who are acquainted with the chi

valric

pages of Froissart and of Joinville will surely remember that those worthy chroniclers narrate, with an especial satisfaction, how their pet knights were accustomed, before spurring to the field of battle, to engage awhile within their oratories in devout exercises and sacred meditation.

Holy men, and even worldly sophists,

VOL I.

B

assure us that life is one long, arduous combat, from beginning to end. Would it not therefore seem that none of us would do amiss, were we to prepare for our struggle by those solemn thoughts which are to be cultivated only in seclusion.

Of this mind at least seemed to be my hero, Edgar Huntingdon, whose struggles will be narrated in the ensuing pages. His oratory he found in a spot about sixteen miles from the home of his childhood, the village of Afrel, on the banks of the river Scarf. As if to counteract the too effeminate fertility of the valley in which it lies cradled, hills on either side, rugged, wild, and stretching far away, encompass it in their stern and sterile girdle. Here, whilst yet a child, Edgar had spent some of his

happiest days. His former home was

tenanted by strangers: the great London was to be henceforth his only hearth;

beyond its shelter was he a stranger and a wanderer.

Afrel is no watering-place, even in the most liberal sense of the word. But its romantic beauty, and its water, which however boasts no property beyond extreme purity, make it a resort for perhaps a hundred visitors, and these principally children, during the summer months. Here, then, had Edgar Huntingdon sat down, a temporary recluse. Yet he knew every denizen of the place; he had known them from his infancy: so that, despite his retirement, there were homely faces round him still. Afrel has but two streets. Through one, the beck, swollen by the tribute of streams that rise far away among the hills, makes pleasant music the long

year round. In the other stands the old church, the same in feature, though changed in ritual, as it was hundreds of years ago. No one dares to say when it was built; but it must have been in rude times, for the architecture can claim no affinity with any acknowledged style or period. A hand, unskilled but reverent (perhaps it moulders in the graveyard below), has carved a rough cross over the uneven porch.

Memory invested with a feeling of fond interest for my hero everybody and everything belonging to Afrel; but there was one old dame who had always been his especial favourite. Betty Nestfield had kept donkeys, time immemorial, on the green mound just below the church, and taken charge of the cold-spring baths, within that tottering whitewashed cottage, halfway up the brow of the southern hill. Like all