s street
after street full of cotton mills, and the ancient manor of the lords of
Hatton had become thoroughly a manufacturing locality.

But Hatton-in-Elmete was in a beautiful locality, lying on a ridge of
hills rising precipitously from the river, and these hills surrounded
the town as with walls and appeared to block up the way into the world
beyond. The principal street lay along their base, and John Hatton rode
up it at the close of the long summer day, when the mills were shut and
the operatives gathered in groups about its places of interest. Every
woman smiled at him, every man touched his cap, but a stranger would
have noticed that not one man bared his head. Yorkshire men do not offer
that courtesy to any man, for its neglect (originally the expression of
strong individuality and self-respect) had become a habit as natural and
spontaneous as their manner or their speech.

About a mile beyond the town, on the summit of a hill, stood Hatton
Hall, and John felt a hurrying sense of home as soon as he caught a
glimpse of its early sixteenth-century towers and chimneys. The road to
it was all uphill, but it was flagged with immense blocks of stone and
shaded by great elm-trees; at the summit a high, old-fashioned iron gate
admitted him into a delightful garden. And in this sweet place there
stood one of the most ancient and picturesque homes of England.

It is here to be noticed that in the early centuries of the English
nation the homes of the nobles distinctly represented local feeling and
physical conditions. In the North they generally stood on hillsides
apart where the winds rattled the boughs of the surrounding pines or
elms and the murmur of a river could be heard from below. The hill and
the trees, the wind and the river, were their usual background, with the
garden and park and the great plantations of trees belting the estate
around; the house itself standing on the highest land within the circle.

Such was the location and adjuncts of the ancient home of the Hattons,
and John Hatton looked up at the old face of it with a conscious love
and pride. The house was built of dark millstone grit in large blocks,
many of them now green and mossy. The roof was of sandstone in thin
slabs, and in its angles grass had taken root. In front there was a
tower and tall gables, with balls and pinnacles. The principal entrance
was a doorway with a Tudor arch, and a large porch resting on stone
pillars. Within this porc