and solitary scenery, where people must observe Nature or else
nothing--where signs of coming storm or change are almost local, and
record themselves on particular cliffs and mountain-peaks, or in the
mists, or in mirrored tints of the familiar lake, and are easily learned
or remembered. At all events, her presage proved too true.

The sun had set an hour and more. It was dark; and an awful
thunder-storm, whose march, like the distant reverberations of an
invading army, had been faintly heard beyond the barriers of Blarwyn
Fells throughout the afternoon, was near them now, and had burst in
deep-mouthed battle among the ravines at the other side, and over the
broad lake, that glared like a sheet of burnished steel under its
flashes of dazzling blue. Wild and fitful blasts sweeping down the
hollows and cloughs of the fells of Golden Friars agitated the lake, and
bent the trees low, and whirled away their sere leaves in melancholy
drift in their tremendous gusts. And from the window, looking on a scene
enveloped in more than the darkness of the night, you saw in the
pulsations of the lightning, before "the speedy gleams the darkness
swallowed," the tossing trees and the flying foam and eddies on the
lake.

In the midst of the hurlyburly, a loud and long knocking came at the
hall-door of Mardykes. How long it had lasted before a chance lull made
it audible I do not know.

There was nothing picturesquely poor, any more than there were evidences
of wealth, anywhere in Sir Bale Mardykes' household. He had no lack of
servants, but they were of an inexpensive and homely sort; and the
hall-door being opened by the son of an old tenant on the estate--the
tempest beating on the other side of the house, and comparative shelter