CONTENTS
| PAGE | |
| [The Story of Luke Barnicott] | 5 |
| [The Castle East of the Sun] | 49 |
| [The Holidays at Barenburg Castle] | 67 |
After Young Luke.
THE STORY OF LUKE BARNICOTT
BY WILLIAM HOWITT.
The village of Monnycrofts, in Derbyshire, may be said to be a distinguished village, for though it is not a city set on a hill, it is a village set on a hill. It may be seen far and wide with its cluster of red brick houses, and its tall gray-stone church steeple, which has weathered the winds of many a century. The distant traveller observes its green upward sloping fields, well embellished by hedgerow trees, and its clumps of trees springing up amongst its scenes, and half hiding them, and says to himself as he trots along, "a pleasant look-out must that hamlet have." And he is right; it has a very pleasant look-out for miles and miles on three sides of it; the fourth is closed by the shoulder of the hill, and the woods and plantations of old Squire Flaggimore. On another hill some half-mile to the left of the village, as you ascend the road to it, stands a windmill, which with its active sails always seems to be beckoning everybody from the country round to come up and see something wonderful. If you were to go up you would see nothing wonderful, but you would have a fine airy prospect over the country, and, ten to one, feel a fine breeze blowing that would do your heart good. You would see the spacious valley of the Erwash winding along for miles, with its fields all mapped out by its hedges and hedgerow trees, and its scattered hamlets, with their church towers, and here and there old woods in dark masses, and on one side the blue hills of the Peak beckoning still more enticingly than Ives's Mill, to go there and see something wonderful. On another side you would see Killmarton Hall and its woods and plantations, and, here and there amongst them, smoke arising from the engine-houses of coal mines which abound there; for all the country round Monnycrofts and Shapely, and so away to Elkstown, there are or have been coal and ironstone mines for ages. Many an old coal mine still stands yawning in the midst of plantations that have now grown up round them. Many a score of mines have been again filled up, and the earth levelled, and a fair cultivation is here beheld, where formerly colliers worked and caroused, and black stacks of coals, and heaps of grey shale, and coke fires were seen at night glimmering through the dark.
Near this mill, Ives's mill, there is another hamlet called Marlpool, as though people could live in a pool, but it is called Marlpool, as a kettle is said to boil when only the water boils in it, because it stands on the edge of a great pool almost amounting to a lake, where marl formerly was dug, and which has for years been filled with water. The colliers living there call it the eighth wonder of the world, because they think it wonderful that a pool should stand on the top of a hill, though that is no wonder at all, but is seen in all quarters of the world. But the colliers there are a simple race, that do not travel much out of their own district, and so have the pleasure of wondering at many things that to us, being familiar, give no pleasure. So it is that we pay always something for our knowledge; and the widow Barnicott who lived on this hill near Ives's mill, at the latter end of the time we are going to talk of, used to congratulate herself when her memory failed with age, that it was rather an advantage, because, she said, everything that she heard was quite new again.