stern even in sunshine; its tower, like a stronghold, looking out
upon the brooding-place of storms. Like its inhabitants, the place
is harsh of aspect, warm at heart; scornful of graces, its honest
solidity speaks the people that built it for their home. This way
and that go forth the well-kept roads, leading to other towns, their
sharp tracks shine over the dark moorland, climbing by wind-swept
hamlets, by many a lonely farm; dipping into sudden hollows, where
streams become cascades, and guiding the wayfarers by high, rocky
passes from dale to dale. A country always impressive by the severe
beauty of its outlines; sometimes speaking to the heart in radiant
stillness, its moments of repose mirthful sometimes, inspiring
joyous life, with the gleams of its vast sky, the sweet, keen breath
of its heaths and pastures; but for the most part shadowed,
melancholy, an austere nurse of the striving spirit of man, with
menace in its mountain-rack, in the rushing voice of its winds and
torrents.

Here, in a small, plain cottage, stone-walled, stone-roofed, looking
over the wide and deep hollow of a stream--a beck in the local
language--which at this point makes a sounding cataract on its
course from the great moor above, lived Jerome Otway. It had been
his home for some ten years. He lived as a man of small but
sufficient means, amid very plain household furniture, and with no
sort of social pretence. With him dwelt his wife, and one
maidservant.

On an evening of midsummer, still and sunny, the old man sat among
his books; open before him the great poem of Dante. His much-lined
face, austere in habitual expression, yet with infinite
possibilities of radiance in the dark eyes, of tenderness on the