“Yes,” said he, “my name is George Kennaway. I—you know me now I see—well after _that_ event I could not bear to be here; I went to Australia, and have done well there. I have come back now, after all these years—and——Well, sir, I have been to see the captain of the slate quarry, and I said to him: I will pay you almost what you like to ask, if you will spare the well and the old pit. Do not choke and bury them up—not whilst I live—for God’s sake—I could not bear it. I saw—that white girl floating there—no—let it remain as it was. Ask what you will.” JACK HANNAFORD JACK HANNAFORD In one of the dips among the hills of the red land stands a cobb cottage, thatched, and facing the sun. The red land consists of rich loam of the colour of what artists call Indian red, overlying sandstone of the same warm colour. It is a soil of the most remarkable fertility. You have but to stick into it a slip of any shrub, and it starts growing at once and does not desist till it is a tree; sow in it any seed you like, and it springs up, and, like the corn in the Gospel, produces an hundredfold. For roses there is simply nothing in the round world equal to it. The grass that flourishes on it is the richest, most succulent, and the most emerald to be found and enjoyed anywhere. Indeed, the cows that consume the herbage on it have grown red as the soil itself, and if the sheep were not shorn annually they would produce fleeces of flame. Even the streams after rain run blood, so flush is this red land with the juices of life. When a man wishes to build a house, he takes the clay, throws in straw, tramples it about for a while, and then builds it up into a wall; it sets, and will out-endure a structure of stone, if only kept covered on top. And a house thus constructed, for warmth, for cosiness, for healthiness, and for home comfort is simply not to be surpassed. And, once again, on this red soil the cheeks of the girls and their kissable lips are a temptation to young men sheerly unavoidable. The cottages on this red land and built of the red clay are low, with the windows of the “chambers,” _i.e._ bedrooms, peering out of the thatch, that is, with the latter just lifted like a pretty eyebrow arched over them, looking coquettishly, with a soft languor in them at the passers-by in the lane. In the lane!—and what lanes these are, deep cut in the red rock, overarched with sycamores, elms, oaks, the rich sides oozing with ripeness, scrambled over by countless creepers, occupied on every ledge by a thousand ferns, studded in March with constellations first of golden celandine, then of pale primroses, crested with dense blue hyacinths intertwinkled with crimson robin, and later towered over by a fringe of gorgeous, purple-belled foxglove, with twenty, thirty, even to fifty flowers on one rod.