The scenery was really beautiful all round, and in some parts even wild; while the distant views of the Cheviot Hills lent a charm to everything.
There was something else held sacred by the Squire as well as the habitable mansion, and that was Burley Old Castle. Undoubtedly a fortress of considerable strength it had been in bygone days, when the wild Scots used to come raiding here, but there was no name for it now save that of a “ruin.” The great north tower still stood firm and bold, and three walls of the lordly hall, its floor green with long, rank grass; the walls themselves partly covered with ivy, with broom growing on the top, which was broad enough for the half-wild goats to scamper along.
There was also the donjon keep, and the remains of a fosse; but all the rest of this feudal castle had been unceremoniously carted away, to erect cowsheds and pig-styes with it.
“So sinks the pride of former days,
When glory’s thrill is o’er.”
No, Squire Broadbent did not interfere with the castle; he left it to the goats and to Archie, who took to it as a favourite resort from the time he could crawl.
But these—all these—new-fangled notions the neighbouring squires and farmers bold could easily have forgiven, had Broadbent not carried his craze for machinery to the very verge of folly. So they thought. Such things might be all very well in America, but they were not called for here. Extraordinary mills driven by steam, no less wonderful-looking harrows, uncanny-like drags and drilling machines, sowing and reaping machines that were fearfully and wonderfully made, and ploughs that, like the mills, were worked by steam.
Terrible inventions these; and even the men that were connected with them had to be brought from the far South, and did not talk a homely, wholesome lingua, nor live in a homely, wholesome way.
His neighbours confessed that his crops were heavier, and the cereals and roots finer; but they said to each other knowingly, “What about the expense of down-put?” And as far as their own fields went, the plough-boy still whistled to and from his work.
Then the new live stock, why, type was followed; type was everything in the Squire’s eye and opinion. No matter what they were, horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and feather stock, even the dogs and birds were the best and purest of the sort to be had.
But for all the head-shaking there had been at first, things really appeared to prosper with the Squire; his big, yellow-painted wagons, with their fine Clydesdale horses, were as well known in the district and town of B— as the brewer’s dray itself. The “nags” were capitally harnessed. What with jet-black, shining leather, brass-work that shone like burnished gold, and crimson-flashing fringes, it was no wonder that the men who drove them were proud, and that they were favourites at every house of call. Even the bailiff himself, on his spirited hunter, looked imposing with his whip in his hand, and in his spotless cords.