of the place and the Christmas season, had left their barracks shortly before midnight, and, proceeding to the officers’ quarters, had greeted them with a hymn.  And the Christmas moon, rising high above the mountains of Gilead and Moab, had found for a short space of time an opening in the curtain of mist and had poured down its light upon the hills of Judea, making the city of Bethlehem seem to the rapt minds of the two Yorkshire dalesmen as though it had been the city of the living God let down from heaven.

Tales of a grandmother

I. The Tree of Knowledge

I spent a certain portion of every year in a village of Upper Wharfedale, where I made many friends among the farm folk.  Among these I give pride of place to Martha Hessletine.

Martha Hessletine was always known in the village as Grannie.  She was everybody’s Grannie.  Crippled with rheumatism, she had kept to her bed for years, and there she held levees, with all the dignity of bearing that one might expect from a French princess in the days of the grand monarque.  The village children would pay her a visit on their way home from afternoon school, and of an evening her kitchen hearth, near to which her bed was always placed by day, was the Parliament House for all the neighbouring farms.  What Grannie did not know of the life of the village and the dale was certainly not worth knowing.

Grannie’s one luxury was a good fire.  A fire, she used to say, gave you three things in one—­warmth, and light, and company.  Usually she burnt coal, but when the peats, which had been cut and dried on the moors in June, were brought down to the farms on sledges, her neighbours would often send her as a present a barrow-load of them.  These would last her for a long time, and the pungent, aromatic smell of the burning turf would greet one long before her kitchen door was reached.

I was sitting by her fireside one evening, and it was of the peat that she was speaking.

“We allus used to burn peats on our farm,” she said, “and varra warm they were of a winter neet.  We’d no kitchen range i’ yon days, but a gert oppen fireplace, wheer thou could look up the chimley and see the stars shining of a frosty neet.”

“But doesn’t a peat fire give off a terrible lot of ash?” I asked.

“Aye, it does that,” she replied, “but we used to like the ash; we could roast taties in’t, and many’s the time we’ve sat i’ the ingle-nook and made our supper o’ taties and buttermilk.”

So her thoughts wandered back to bygone times, while I, not wishing to interrupt her, had taken the poker in my hand and with it was tracing geometrical figures in the peat-ash on the hearthstone.  So absorbed was I in my circles and pentagons that I did not notice that Grannie had stopped short in her story, and was taking a lively interest in what I was doing.  It was with no little surprise, therefore, that I suddenly heard her exclaim, in a voice of half-suppressed terror:  “What is thou doing that for?” and turning round, I was startled to see on her usually placid face the look of a hunted animal.