"JENNY LAUNTON."

PART II

CHAPTER I

(I)

Barham, as all Yorkshire knows, lies at the foot of a long valley, where
it emerges into the flatter district round Harrogate. It has a railway
all to itself, which goes no further, for Barham is shut in on the north
by tall hills and moors, and lies on the way to nowhere. It is almost
wholly an agricultural town, and has a curious humped bridge, right in
the middle of the town, where men stand about on market days and discuss
the price of bullocks. It has two churches--one, disused, on a
precipitous spur above the town, surrounded by an amazingly irregular
sort of churchyard, full, literally, to bursting (the Kirkbys lie there,
generation after generation of them, beneath pompous tombs), and the
other church a hideous rectangular building, with flat walls and
shallow, sham Gothic windows. It was thought extremely beautiful when it
was built forty years ago. The town itself is an irregular and rather
picturesque place, with a twisting steep High Street, looking as if a
number of houses had been shot at random into this nook among the hills
and left to find their own levels.

The big house where the Kirkbys have lived since the middle of the
seventeenth century is close to the town, as the squire's house ought to
be, and its park gates open right upon the northern end of the old
bridge. There's nothing of great interest in the house (I believe there
is an old doorway in the cellar, mentioned in guide-books), since it was
rebuilt about the same time as the new church first rose. It is just a
big, comfortable, warm, cool, shady sort of house, with a large hall and
a fine oak staircase, surrounded by lawns and shrubberies, that adjoin
on the west the lower slopes, first of the park and then of the moors
that stretch away over the horizon.

There is a pleasant feudal air about the whole place--feudal, in a small
and neighborly kind of way. Jack's father died just a year before his
only son came of age; and Jack himself, surrounded by sisters and an
excellent and beneficently-minded mother, has succeeded to all the
immemorial rights and powers, written and unwritten, of the Squire of
Barham. He entertained me delightfully for three or four days a few
months ago, when I was traveling about after Frank's footsteps, and I
noticed with pleasure as we drove through the town that there was
hardly a living creature in the town whom he did not salute; and who d