flat, like Salisbury Plain, but are broken into ravines and deep
watercourses and rugged dells hither and thither; where old oaks are
standing, in which life seems to have dwindled down to the last spark;
but the last spark is still there, and the old oaks give forth their
scanty leaves from year to year.

In among the hills, somewhat off the high road from Minehead to
Taunton, and about five miles from the sea, stands the little town, or
village, of Belton, and the modern house of Mr Amedroz, which is called
Belton Castle. The village for it is in truth no more, though it still
maintains a charter for a market, and there still exists on Tuesdays
some pretence of an open sale of grain and butcher's meat in the square
before the church-gate contains about two thousand persons. That and
the whole parish of Belton did once and that not long ago belong to the
Amedroz family. They had inherited it from the Beltons of old, an
Amedroz having married the heiress of the family. And as the parish is
large, stretching away to Exmoor on one side and almost to the sea on
the other, containing the hamlet of Redicote, lying on the Taunton high
road Redicote, where the post-office is placed, a town almost in
itself, and one which is now much more prosperous than Belton as the
property when it came to the first Amedroz had limits such as these,
the family had been considerable in the county. But these limits had
been straitened in the days of the grandfather and the father of
Bernard Amedroz; and he, when he married a Miss Winterfield of Taunton,
was thought to have done very well, in that mortgages were paid off the
property with his wife's money to such an extent as to leave him in
clear possession of an estate that gave him two thousand a year. As Mr
Amedroz had no grand neighbours near him, as the place is remote and
the living therefore cheap, and as with this income there was no
question of annual visits to London, Mr and Mrs Amedroz might have done