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 did man’s work; of a father, who spoke seldom and never twice—­a father whose heavy foot upon the threshold sent his children scuttling like rabbits to hidden lairs and dens.  She remembered the dogs; the bright gun-barrel above the chimney-piece; the steam of clothes hung to dry after many a soaking in “soft” weather; the reek of the peat; the brown eyes and steaming nostrils of the bullocks, that sometimes looked through the kitchen window in icy winter twilights, as though they would willingly change their byres for the warmth within.

Mrs. Blanchard enjoyed the thought that her son should reanimate these scenes of her own childhood; and he, burning with energy and zeal, and not dead to his own significance as a man of money, saw promises of prosperity on either hand.  It lay with him, he told his heart, to win smiling fatness from this hungry region.  Right well he knew how it came about that those who had preceded him had failed, missed their opportunities, fooled themselves, and flung away their chances.  Evidences of their ignorance stared at him from the curtains of the mist, but he knew better; he was a man who had thought a bit in his time and had his head screwed on the right way, thank God.  These facts he poured into his mother’s ear, and she smiled thoughtfully, noted the changes time had wrought, and indicated to him those things the landlord might reasonably be expected to do before Will should sign and seal.