market, and the proceeds to be divided among their
respective heirs.

A more hopeless landlord or set of landtords to
rent under could not well be imagined, and the
tenant found that if the two ladies agreed to do
repairs or drainage, the third owner was sure to
object, and after much patient endurance he re-
signed himself and the farm to the force of cir-
cumstances, and rubbed on as well as he could,
paying his rent, but exhausting the land and
allowing the house to fall into utter decay. Nearly
all the property in the parish except this farm was
still owned by a nobleman, who took his title from
the place, and whose ancestors had lived in the
Castle when its strong walls and heavy towers
frowned beside the grey stone church, and gave
the hamlet a dignity which it no longer possessed.

It would be a matter of curious speculation to guess
how any body ever got in or out of Beechley in those
days, when roads did not exist and wheels were
seldom met with in the more retired districts. For
even a few years ago it was no easy matter to find it,
hidden away amid a perfect net-work of cross-
country lanes, it taxed the temper and ingenuity of
the Birmingham or Bromsgrove flymen, and there
are legends of travellers who have been driven about

the neighbourhood for a whole night, in their efforts |

to reach a place which may be seen for miles on
every side, but which needs the guidance of a
county map, to enable a stranger to getatit. There
are many such parishes—they can hardly be called
villages—in the Midland counties, parishes that
lie between the great trunk roads, and are miles
away from a railway station; places where life

flows on much as it might do in the backwoods of |

Canada or the clearings in Australia, where the
advent of a stranger is hailed as an event, where
every body knows what every body else does and
says, almost what they eat and drink, and certainly
what they wear. For is not a new bonnet, seen in
the Simpkins’ pew, a matter to be canvassed for a
week? and does not Mrs. Wilkins shake her head
doubtfully over the pretty muslins of the Gifford
girls, and hope that they are not too fine for
farmer’s daughters? and is not Mr. Gifford’s high
farming looked upon with suspicion and distrust,
and, like his daughters’ dresses, classed among that
dreadful set of events which Mrs. Wilkins considers
“may be all right, there ain’t no denying, but things
isn’t as they was in my day. I holds wi’ gells
turning up their sleeves and churning the butter,
and wi’ masters not putting no more stock on the
land than they can feed off it—instead of stuffing
of beastes with corn as is good for Christians.”
The prejudice against any thing new lingers in
these places as in a last stronghold, and though the
inhabitants may see that the high farming answers

WINNIE CORSELLIS; OR, DEATH IN THE POT. 217 |

the land, and that Mr. Gifford has twelve bags to |
the acre instead of seven, and that his wife’s dairy
averages nine pounds of butter a cow instead of
four ; and that the girls can do the housework, turn |
the churn, and yet look tidy, and neat, even in
the midst of it ; though they see’ these things,
they won’t believe them, and enjoy delivering
dismal prophecies concerning the future of such
new-fangled notions, when they smoke their long
pipes and drink home-brewed beer at their silent
meetings at each other’s home. Not that the
Beechley people mix much together—they live
well away, one farm being mostly a mile from its
nearest neighbour, and they hold that the virtue
of “‘keepitig themselves to themselves” stands high
in the decalogue ; but still the men occasionally
stray across their own fields, and by sitting for an
hour or two ina kitchen not their own, or leaning
in silent contemplation with a neighbour over his
fold-yard gate, give a certain flavour of society to
the day which has been broken in upon by a face
not belonging to the household.

It would be hard to find a prettier spot any
where in the midlands than was the Castle Farm.
It lay a few hundred yards on the north-western
slope of Beechley Hill, and nestled in a little
natural ravine which sheltered it on the right and
left, while the crown of the hill protected it in
front; only at the back, where it looked down into
the valley, was it open to the wind, and though
it was cold enough in winter when a gale did
blow from that quarter, the prevailing set of the
breeze was westerly two-thirds of the year, and
easterly for the remaining portion, so the Castle
Farm did not get a thorough storm, blowing open
its doors and threatening its chimneys, above two
or three times in the twelve months, a fact which
in that high lying district made it appear a very
haven of shelter. For at the Close Farm, where
the Simpkinses lived, and at Old Brook, where the
Wilkinses dwelt, there were very many days when
the wind would almost take the workmen off their
legs, when the tiles came flying about the yard,
and the stock crouched under the hedges and walls,
afraid to venture out of shelter for hours together.
But this never happened at the Castle; the beech
and elm-trees that grew round it might rock and
sway, but the house was safe, and standing at the
back-door you might look down upon wind-swept
fields, and bending trees, and see volumes of Black
Country smoke drifting across the horizon, some-
times in heavy masses, and sometimes in long dark
streamers, cut off sharp at the tops of the high
chimneys by the force of the gale, and floating
away in level lines before the wind. Beechley was
not in the Black Country, but it stood just on the
outside edge, and looked down on coal-pits and

: : , nen ; 1 ing-
in the long-run, that the corn comes back again to | iron-works, on blasting-furnaces and smelting