hought was to find a place where he and his following, a little
clan, could earn their bread as sturdy workers living by the work of
their hands; no beggars nor parasites they, but earnest toilers, the men
who introduced their industry every here and there.

Some two hundred years ago, old Guillaume found Belle Dale ready with
its motive power to his hand. He wanted water for his silk-mill: there
it was, and, in a small way, he and his began their toil.

Their nearest neighbours, few indeed, soon found them quiet, earnest,
religious men, and the welcome they had was warm. In their gratitude
they said, "France to us is dead; this in future is our home;" and,
though clinging to their language, they cast aside their fine patrician
names, making them English and homely like those of the dwellers near.
There was something almost grotesque at times in the changes that they
made, but they were not noticed here. The D'aubignes became Daubeneys,
or homely Dobbs; Chapuis, Shoppee; Jean Boileau, the great silk-weaver's
right hand, laughingly translated his name to Drinkwater; and, as the
time went on and generations passed, a descendant, "disagreeable
old Boil O!" as the two boys called him, was the odd man,
Jack-of-all-trades, and general mechanician at Beldale Mill, the servant
of old Guillaume Villars' son, many generations down--John Willows now,
father of Will of the Mill.

A long piece of pedigree this, but we must say who's who, and what's
what, and, by the same rule, where's where; so here we have Beldale Mill
and the boys--just the place they loved and looked forward to reaching
again from the great school at Worksop, when the holidays came round.

There was no such place for beauty, they felt sure; no such fishing
anywhere, they believed; in fact, everything the country boy could wish
for was to their hand. Collect?--I should think they did: eggs, from
those of the birds of prey to the tiny dot of the golden-crested wren;
butterflies and moths, from the Purple Emperors that were netted as they
hovered over the tops of the scrub oaks, and hawk-moths that darted
through the garden, the only level place about the bottom of the glen.
Fishing too--the artist who came down was only too glad to make them
friends, seeing how they knew the homes of the wily trout in the rocky
nooks below the great fall down by the sluice, where the waters rushed
from beneath the splashing wheel; and in the deep, deep depths of the
great da