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LUKE BARNICOTT.

by

WILLIAM HOWITT.

And Other Stories.







Twenty-Eighth Thousand.

Cassell & Company, Limited:
London, Paris, New York & Melbourne.




CONTENTS.


                                         PAGE

    THE STORY OF LUKE BARNICOTT             5

    THE CASTLE EAST OF THE SUN             49

    THE HOLIDAYS AT BARENBURG CASTLE       67




[Illustration: After Young Luke.]




THE STORY OF LUKE BARNICOTT

BY WILLIAM HOWITT.


The village of Monnycrofts, in Derbyshire, may be said to be a
distinguished village, for though it is not a city set on a hill, it is
a village set on a hill. It may be seen far and wide with its cluster of
red brick houses, and its tall gray-stone church steeple, which has
weathered the winds of many a century. The distant traveller observes
its green upward sloping fields, well embellished by hedgerow trees, and
its clumps of trees springing up amongst its scenes, and half hiding
them, and says to himself as he trots along, "a pleasant look-out must
that hamlet have." And he is right; it has a very pleasant look-out for
miles and miles on three sides of it; the fourth is closed by the
shoulder of the hill, and the woods and plantations of old Squire
Flaggimore. On another hill some half-mile to the left of the village,
as you ascend the road to it, stands a windmill, which with its active
sails always seems to be beckoning everybody from the country round to
come up and see something wonderful. If you were to go up you would see
nothing wonderful, but you would have a fine airy prospect over the
country, and, ten to one, feel a fine breeze blowing that would do your
heart good. You would see the spacious valley of the Erwash winding
along for miles, with its fields all mapped out by its hedges and
hedgerow trees, and its scattered hamlets, with their church towers,
and here and there old woods in dark masses, and on one side the blue
hills of the Peak beckoning still more enticingly than Ives's Mill, to
go there and see something wonderful. On another side you would see
Killmarton Hall and its woods and plantations, and, here and there
amongst them, smoke arising from the engine-houses of coal mines which
abound there; for all the country round Monnycrofts and Shapely, and so
away to Elkstown, there are or have been coal and ironstone mines for
ages. Many an old coal mine still stands yawning in the midst of
plantations that have now grown up round them. Many a score of mines
have been again filled up, and the earth levelled, and a fair
cultivation is here beheld, where formerly colliers worked and caroused,
and black stacks of coals, and heaps of grey shale, and coke fires were
seen at night glimmering through the dark.

Near this mill, Ives's mill, there is another hamlet called Marlpool, as
though people could live in a pool, but it is called Marlpool, as a
kettle is said to boil when only the water boils in it, because it
stands on the edge of a great pool almost amounting to a lake, where
marl formerly was dug, and which has for years been filled with water.
The colliers living there call it the eighth wonder of the world,
because they think it wonderful that a pool should stand on the top of a
hill, though that is no wonder at all, but is seen in all quarters of
the world. But the colliers there are a simple race, that do not travel
much out of their own district, and so have the pleasure of wondering at
many things that to us, being familiar, give no pleasure. So it is that
we pay always something for our knowledge; and the widow Barnicott who
lived on this hill near Ives's mill, at the latter end of the time we
are going to talk of, used to congratulate herself when her memory
failed with age, that it was rather an advantage, because, she said,
everything that she heard was quite new again.

But at the time when my story opens, Beckey Barnicott was not a widow.
She was the wife of Luke Barnicott, the millers man, that is,