collieries and shaken by the strain of mighty engines. Climb
Stanbury Hill at nightfall, and, looking eastward, you behold far
off a dusky ruddiness in the sky, like the last of an angry sunset;
with a glass you can catch glimpses of little tongues of flame,
leaping and quivering on the horizon. That is Belwick. The good
abbots, who were wont to come out in the summer time to Wanley,
would be at a loss to recognise their consecrated home in those
sooty relics. Belwick, with its hundred and fifty fire-vomiting
blast-furnaces, would to their eyes more nearly resemble a certain
igneous realm of which they thought much in their sojourn upon
earth, and which, we may assure ourselves, they dream not of in the
quietness of their last long sleep.

A large house, which stands aloof from the village and a little
above it, is Wanley Manor. The county history tells us that Wanley
was given in the fifteenth century to that same religious
foundation, and that at the dissolution of monasteries the Manor
passed into the hands of Queen Catherine. The house is
half-timbered; from the height above it looks old and peaceful amid
its immemorial trees. Towards the end of the eighteenth century it
became the home of a family named Eldon, the estate including the
greater part of the valley below. But an Eldon who came into
possession when William IV. was King brought the fortunes of his
house to a low ebb, and his son, seeking to improve matters by
abandoning his prejudices and entering upon commercial speculation,
in the end left a widow and two boys with little more to live upon
than the income which arose from Mrs. Eldon's settlements. The Manor
was shortly after this purchased by a Mr. Mutimer, a Belwick
ironmaster; but Mrs. Eldon and her boys still inhabited the house,
in consequence of certain events which will shortly be narrated.