Produced by Joel Erickson, Christine Gehring, Mary Meehan
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net
FERN'S HOLLOW
By HESBA STRETTON
Author of 'Jessica's First Prayer,' 'Alone in London' 'Pilgrim Street,'
'Little Meg's Children' etc.
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I. THE HUT IN THE HOLLOW
II. THE DYING FATHER
III. STEPHEN'S FIRST VICTORY
IV. THREATENING CLOUDS
V. MISS ANNE
VI. THE RED GRAVEL PIT
VII. POOR SNIP
VIII. STEPHEN AND THE GAMEKEEPER
IX. HOMELESS
X. THE CABIN ON THE CINDER-HILL
XI. STEPHEN AND THE RECTOR
XII. VISIT OF BLACK BESS
XIII. THE OLD SHAFT
XIV. A BROTHER'S GRIEF
XV. RENEWED CONFLICT
XVI. SOFTENING THOUGHTS
XVII. A NEW CALLING
XVIII. THE PANTRY WINDOW
XIX. FIRE! FIRE!
XX. STEPHEN'S TESTIMONY
XXI. FORGIVENESS
XXII. THE MASTER'S DEATHBED
XXIII. THE HOME RESTORED
FERN'S HOLLOW
CHAPTER I.
THE HUT IN THE HOLLOW.
Just upon the border of Wales, but within one of the English counties,
there is a cluster of hills, rising one above the other in gradual
slopes, until the summits form a long, broad tableland, many miles
across. This tableland is not so flat that all of it can be seen at once,
but here and there are little dells, shaped like deep basins, which the
country folk call hollows; and every now and then there is a rock or
hillock covered with yellow gorse bushes, from the top of which can be
seen the wide, outspread plains, where hundreds of sheep and ponies are
feeding, which belong to the farmers and cottagers dwelling in the valley
below. Besides the chief valley, which divides the mountains into two
groups, and which is broad enough for a village to be built in, there are
long, narrow glens, stretching up into the very heart of the tableland,
and draining away the waters which gather there by the melting of snow in
the winter and the rain of thunderstorms in summer. Down every glen flows
a noisy mountain stream, dashing along its rocky course with so many tiny
waterfalls and impatient splashes, that the gurgling and bubbling of
brooks come up even into the quietness of the tableland and mingle with
the singing of the birds and the humming of the bees among the heather.
There are not many paths across the hills, except the narrow sheep-walks
worn by the tiny feet of the sheep as they follow one another in long,
single lines, winding in and out through the clumps of gorse; and few
people care to explore the solitary plains, except the shepherds who have
the charge of the flocks, and tribes of village children who go up every
summer to gather the fruit of the wild and hardy bilberry wires.
The whole of this broad tableland, as well as the hills, are common
pasture for the inhabitants of the valleys, who have an equal right to
keep sheep and ponies on the uplands with the lord of the manor. But the
property of the soil belongs to the latter, and he only has the power of
enclosing the waste so as to make fields and plant woods upon it,
provided always that he leaves a sufficient portion for the use of the
villagers. In times gone by, however, when the lord of the manor and his
agent were not very watchful, it was the practice of poor persons, who
did not care how uncomfortably they lived, to seek out some distant
hollow, or the farthest and most hidden side of a hillock, and there
build themselves such a low, small hut, as should escape the notice of
any passer-by, should they chance to go that way. Little by little,
making low fences which looked like the surrounding gorse bushes, they
enclosed small portions of the waste land, or, as it is called,
encroached upon the common; and if they were able to keep their
encroachment without having their hedges broken down, or if the lord of
the manor neglected to demand rent for it for the space of twenty years,
their fields and gardens became securely and legally their own. Because
of this right, therefore, are to be found here and there little farms of
three or four fields a-piece, looking like islands, with the wide, open
common around them; and some miles away over the breezy uplands there is
even a little hamlet of these poor cottages, all belonging to the people
who dwell in them.
Many years ago, even many years before my story begins, a poor woman--who
was far worse off than a widow, for her husband had just been sentenced
to transportation for twenty-one years--strayed down to these mountains
upon her sorrowful way home to her native place. She had her only child
with her, a boy five years of age; and from some reason or other, perhaps
because she could not bear to go home in shame and disgrace, she sought
out a very lonely hiding-place among the hills, and with her own hands
reared rough walls of turf and stones, until she had formed such a rude
hut as would just give shelter to her and her boy. There they lived,
uncared for and solitary, until the husband came back, after suffering
his twenty-one years' punishment, and entered into a little spot of land
entirely his own. Then, with the assistance of his son, a strong,
full-grown young man, he rebuilt the cottage, though upon a scale not
much larger or much more commodious than his wife's old hut.
Like other groups of mountains, the highest and largest are those near
the centre, and from them the land descends in lower and lower levels,
with smaller hills and smoother valleys, until at length it sinks into
the plain. Then they are almost like children's hills and valleys; the
slopes are not too steep for very little feet to climb, and the rippling
brooks are not in so much hurry to rush on to the distant river, but that
boys and girls at play can stop them for a little time with slight banks
of mud and stones. In just such a smooth, sloping dell, down in a soft
green basin, called Fern's Hollow, was the hiding-place where the
convict's sad wife had found an unmolested shelter.
This dwelling, the second one raised by the returned convict and his son,
is built just below the brow of the hill, so that the back of the hut is
formed of the hill itself, and only the sides and front are real walls.
These walls are made of rubble, or loose, unhewn stones, piled together
with a kind of mortar, which is little more than clay baked hard in the
heat of the sun. The chimney is a bit of old stove-pipe, scarcely rising
above the top of the hill behind; and, but for the smoke, we could look
down the pipe, as through the tube of a telescope, upon the family
sitting round the hearth within. The thatch, overgrown with moss, appears
as a continuation of the slope of the hill itself, and might almost
deceive the simple sheep grazing around it. Instead of a window there is
only a square hole, covered by a shutter when the light is not urgently
needed; and the door is so much too small for its sill and lintels as to
leave large chinks, through which adventurous bees and beetles may find
their way within. You may see at a glance that there is but one room, and
that there can be no up-stairs to the hut, except that upper storey of
the broad, open common behind it, where the birds sleep softly in their
cosy nests. Before the house is a garden; and beyond that a small field
sown with silver oats, which are dancing and glistening in the breeze and
sunshine; while before the garden wicket, but not enclosed from the
common, is a warm, sunny valley, in the very middle of which a slender
thread of a brook widens into a lovely little basin of a pool, clear and
cold, the very place for the hill ponies to come and drink.
Looking steadily up this pleasant valley from the threshold of the
cottage, we can just see a fine, light film of white smoke against the
blue sky. Two miles away, right down off the mountains, there is a small
coal-field and a quarry of limestone. In a distant part of the country
there are large tracts of land where coal and iron pits are sunk on every
side, and their desolate and barren pit-banks extend for miles round,
while a heavy cloud of smoke hangs always in the air. But here, just at
the foot of these mountains, there is one little seam of coal, as if
placed for the express use of these people, living so far away from the
larger coal-fields. The Botfield lime and coal works cover only a few
acres of the surface; but underground there are long passages bored
beneath the pleasant pastures and the yellow cornfields. From the
mountains, Botfield looks rather like a great blot upon the fair
landscape, with its blackened engine-house and banks of coal-dust, its
long range of limekilns, sultry and quivering in the summer sunshine, and
its heavy, groaning water-wheel, which pumps up the water from the pits
below. But the colliers do not think it so, nor their wives in the
scattered village beyond; they do not consider the lime and coal works a
blot, for their living depends upon them, and they may rightly say, 'As
for the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned up as it
were fire.'
Even Stephen Fern, who would a thousand times rather work out on the free
hillside than in the dark passages underground, does not think it a pity
that the Botfield pit has been discovered at the foot of the mountains.
It is nearly seven o'clock in the evening, and he is coming over the brow
of the green dell, with his long shadow stretching down it. A very long
shadow it is for so small a figure to cast, for if we wait a minute or
two till Stephen draws nearer, we shall see that he is no strong, large
man, but a slight, thin, stooping boy, bending rather wearily under a
sack of coals, which he is carrying on his shoulders, and pausing now and
then to wipe his heated forehead with the sleeve of his collier's flannel
jacket. When he lifts up the latch of his home we will enter with him,
and see the inside of the hut at Fern's Hollow.