like to take you in. Behave well, and I'll put
you to school (O yes, I'll put you to school!),
though I am not obligated to do it. I am a
servant of the Lord, George, and I have been a
good servant to him (I have!) these five-and-
thirty years. The Lord has had a good servant
in me, and he knows it."

What I then supposed him to mean by this, I
cannot imagine. As little do I know when I
began to comprehend that he was a prominent
member of some obscure denomination or
congregation, every member of which held forth to
the rest when so inclined, and among whom he
was called Brother Hawkyard. It was enough
for me to know, on that day in the Ward, that
the farmer's cart was waiting for me at the street
corner. I was not slow to get into it, for it was
the first ride I ever had in my life.

It made me sleepy, and I slept. First, I
stared at Preston streets as long as they lasted,
and, meanwhile, I may have had some small
dumb wondering within me whereabouts our
cellar was. But I doubt it. Such a worldly
little devil was I, that I took no thought who
would bury Father and Mother, or where they
would be buried, or when. The question whether
the eating and drinking by day, and the covering
by night, would be as good at the farm-house as
at the Ward, superseded those questions.

The jolting of the cart on a loose stony road
awoke me, and I found that we were mounting
a steep hill, where the road was a rutty by-road
through a field. And so, by fragments of an
ancient terrace, and by some rugged outbuildings
that had once been fortified, and passing under
a ruined gateway, we came to the old farm-house
in the thick stone wall outside the old
quadrangle of Hoghton Towers. Which I looked at,
like a stupid savage; seeing no speciality in;
seeing no antiquity in; assuming all farm-houses
to resemble it; assigning the decay I noticed, to
the one potent cause of all ruin that I knew—
Poverty; eyeing the pigeons in their flights,
the cattle in their stalls, the ducks in the pond,
and the fowls pecking about the yard, with a
hungry hope that plenty of them might be killed
for dinner while I stayed there; wondering
whether the scrubbed dairy vessels drying in the
sunlight could be the goodly porringers out of
which the master ate his belly-filling food, and
which he polished when he had done, according
to my Ward experience; shrinkingly doubtful
whether the shadows passing over that airy
height on the bright spring day were not
something in the nature of frowns; sordid, afraid,
unadmiring, a small Brute to shudder at.

To that time I had never had the faintest
impression of beauty. I had had no knowledge
whatever that there was anything lovely in this
life. When I had occasionally slunk up the
cellar-steps into the street and glared in at shop-
windows, I had done so with no higher feelings
than we may suppose to animate a mangey young
dog or wolf-cub. It is equally the fact that I
had never been alone, in the sense of holding
unselfish converse with myself. I had been
solitary often enough, but nothing better.

Such was my condition when I sat down
to my dinner, that day, in the kitchen of the
old farm-house. Such was my condition when
I lay on my bed in the old farm-house that
night, stretched out opposite the narrow
mullioned window, in the cold light of the moon,
like a young Vampire.

                FIFTH CHAPTER.

What do I know, now, of Hoghton Towers?
Very little, for I have been gratefully unwilling
to disturb my first impressions. A house,
centuries old, on high ground a mile or so
removed from the road between Preston and
Blackburn, where the first James of England in
his hurry to make money by making Baronets,
perhaps, made some of those remunerative
dignitaries. A house, centuries old, deserted and
falling to pieces, its woods and gardens long
since grass land or ploughed up, the rivers
Ribble and Darwen glancing below it, and a
vague haze of smoke against which not even
the supernatural prescience of the first Stuart
could foresee a Counterblast, hinting at Steam
Power, powerful in two distances.

What did I know, then, of Hoghton Towers?
When I first peeped in at the gate of the
lifeless quadrangle, and started from the
mouldering statue becoming visible to me like its
Guardian Ghost; when I stole round by the
back of the farm-house and got in among the
ancient rooms, many of them with their floors
and ceilings falling, the beams and rafters
hanging dangerously down, the plaster dropping
as I trod, the oaken panels stripped away,
the windows half walled up, half broken; when
I discovered a gallery commanding the old
kitchen, and looked down between balustrades
upon a massive old table and benches, fearing
to see I know not what dead-alive creatures
come in and seat themselves and look up with
I know not what dreadful eyes, or lack of eyes,
at me; when all over the house I was awed by
gaps and chinks where the sky stared sorrowfully
at me, where the birds passed, and the
ivy rustled, and the stains of winter weather
blotched the rotten floors; when down at the
bottom of dark pits of staircase into which the stairs
had sunk, green leaves trembled, butterflies
fluttered, and bees hummed in and out through
the broken doorways; when encircling the
whole ruin were sweet scents and sights of
fresh green growth and ever-renewing life, that
I had never dreamed of;—I say, when I
passed into such clouded perception of these
things as my dark soul could compass, what
did I know then of Hoghton Towers?

I have written that the sky stared sorrowfully
at me. Therein have I anticipated the
answer. I knew that all these things looked
sorrowfully at me. That they seemed to sigh
or whisper, not without pity for me: "Alas!
poor worldly little devil!"

There were two or three rats at the bottom
of one of the smaller pits of broken staircase
when I craned over and looked in. They were
scuffling for some prey that was there. And when