PART ONE



CHAPTER I

THE EARLY MARRIED LIFE OF THE MORELS

"THE BOTTOMS" succeeded to "Hell Row". Hell Row was a block of thatched,
bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There
lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away.
The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small
mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded
wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these
same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the
few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth,
making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and
the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs
here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers,
straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took place, gin-pits were
elbowed aside by the large mines of the financiers. The coal and iron
field of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite
and Co. appeared. Amid tremendous excitement, Lord Palmerston formally
opened the company's first mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood
Forest.

About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through growing old had