s in time past, had left their traces, as though even spring
sunlight was powerless to eradicate the black memories of winters past,
or soften the bitter certainty of others yet to come. The fields,
snatched from the Moor in time long past, now showed a desire to return
to their wild mother again. The bars of cultivation were broken and the
land struggled to escape. Scabious would presently throw a mauve pallor
over more than one meadow croft; in another, waters rose and rushes and
yellow iris flourished and defied husbandry; elsewhere stubble, left
unploughed by the last defeated farmer, gleamed silver-grey through a
growth of weeds; while at every point the Moor thrust forward hands
laden with briar and heather. They surmounted the low stone walls and
fed and flourished upon the clods and peat that crowned them. Nature
waved early gold of the greater furze in the van of her oncoming, and
sent her wild winds to sprinkle croft and hay-field, ploughed land and
potato patch, with thistledown and the seeds of the knapweed and rattle
and bracken fern. These heathen things and a thousand others, in all the
early vigour of spring, rose triumphant above the meek cultivation. They
trampled it, strangled it, choked it, and maddened the agriculturist by
their sturdy and stubborn persistence. A forlorn, pathetic blot upon the
land of the mist was Newtake, seen even under conditions of sunlight and
fair weather; but beheld beneath autumnal rains, observed at seasons of
deep snow or in the dead waste of frozen winters, its apparition
rendered the most heavy-hearted less sad before the discovery that there
existed a human abode more hateful, a human outlook more oppressive,
than their own.

To-day heavy moorland vapours wrapped Newtake in ghostly raiment, yet no
forlorn emotions clouded the survey of those who now wandered about the
lifeless farm. In the mind of one, here retracing the course of her
maidenhood, this scene, if sad, was beautiful. The sycamores, whose
brown spikes had burst into green on a low bough or two, were the trees
she loved best in the world; the naked field on the hillside, wherein a
great stone ring shone grey through the silver arms of the mist,
represented the theatre of her life's romance. There she had stolen
oftentimes to her lover, and in another such, not far distant, had her
son been born. Thoughts of little sisters rose in the naked kitchen,
with the memory of a flat-breasted, wild-eyed mother, who di