"Oh, by Jove that she does!" exclaimed Sir John Slingsby, "she feeds half the children in the parish. You take good care of him, Mrs. Hope--and now, Ned," he continued, turning from the housekeeper to his guest, "what the devil's the meaning of all this?"
"I will tell you by and by, Sir John," answered Captain Hayward. "Pray go to dinner and I will be down directly. Many apologies for being late; but it was not to be helped. I will not be ten minutes; but do not let me detain you--"
"But what is it all about? What has happened? Who the deuce is the child?" exclaimed Sir John. "Do you think either men or women can eat soup or digest fish with their stomachs full of curiosity?"
"By and by, Sir John, by and by," said Ned Hayward, making towards the stairs. "You shall have the whole story for dessert. At present I am dirty, and the dinner's waiting. It will get cold, and your curiosity keep hot."
Thus saying he left them, and the rest of the party proceeded to dinner.
CHAPTER X.
The Poacher's Cottage.
If you quit the high-road from Tarningham on the right-hand side by that little sandy path, just a hundred yards on the other side of the stone pump, equidistant from it and the mile-stone which marks on the hither side, five miles and a half from Tarningham, and walk straight on, it leads you over the moor, and through the midst of scenery very common in England, not much loved by ordinary ramblers, but which for me and a few others has a peculiar and almost indescribable charm. The ground is broken, undulated, full of deep sand-pits and holes, frequently covered with gorge and heath, spotted occasionally with self-sown shrubs, a stunted hawthorn here and there, two or three melancholy firs, gathered together on the top of a mound, like a party of weary watchers trying to console each other by close companionship, while from time to time a few light birches, with their quivering leaves, and thin, graceful arms, and ragged coats of silver and brown, are seen hanging over the edge of a bank, or decorating the side of a hollow. If you dip down into one of the low dells, a sensation of hermit-like solitude comes upon you. You believe that there at least you may be,
The world forgetting, by the world forgot;
and you feel an irresistible desire to sit down at the foot of this shrub, or that, where the roots, like a well-governed state, serve to keep together in close union, the light and incoherent materials that sustain them, and there to commune with your own thoughts in the silent presence of Nature. If you mount one of the little hills, the scene and the sensation is very different, The solitude is as deep as striking; no living thing is to be seen, unless it be a wild curlew, with its thin arched wings, whirling away with a shrill cry in the enjoyment of its own loneliness; but there is an expansion, a grandeur, a strange sublimity in the extent of waste, with the long lines waving off in different hues like the billows of the ocean, first yellow sand, and green short turf, then a brown mass, where the sight loses its distinctness, then perhaps a gleam of water, then a blue line, deep as indigo, where the azure air and the black shade mingle together under some threatening cloud; then long undulations of purple, fainter and fainter, till who shall say where earth ends and sky begins. The bleakness, the stillness, the solitariness, the varied colouring, the vast extent, the very monotony of the forms mingle together in a whole that has not less grandeur in it than the highest mountain that ever raised its proud brow above its brother giants.