Arthur Knight had found the very place he wanted—a large space of moorland and waste miles of land unoccupied, excepting for a few farmhouses. The land was not in a very high state of cultivation; but when, for the first time, he stood and gazed upon it, his imagination covered it, as it was to-day, with bright and pleasant homes and long bits of garden-land, in which the people might learn the joy of growing their own flowers and vegetables. The place chosen was at the head of a glen, which led down to Afon Wen, a small village on the shore. The place itself—five miles from Afon Wen—was called Craighelbyl. There was a large old house on the top of the hill standing in its own grounds, which wore a very neglected and dejected appearance. It had been left to itself for nearly a hundred years, and all sorts of interesting and dreadful tales were told about it. It had belonged to “one of the great families” years and years ago, and the old sailors could spin as good a yarn about it as of the sea itself. The owner of the Hall had kept a smuggling cellar on the coast; and it was said that a long underground passage led from the Hall to the sea. This man had been an irreligious Englishman, who had married a Welsh lady and treated her badly; and there were dark stories of a crime once committed in the house, which had in consequence stood tenantless for a long period. There were not many things left in it; there was a little furniture, but it had disappeared, nobody knew how; and if there did happen to be a table or a chair in some of the cottages thereabouts which looked as if it did not quite belong to the cottages, nobody knew how it came to be there, certainly nobody belonging to this generation. The last person who had occupied the house was a farmer, but he and his wife had died there. Another farmer thought of taking it, but there was no land to be farmed, little but moors and rocks and sea, and this man only spent a week there, and it was such a stormy week as only this part of our country knows. So he soon had enough of it, and he declared that the rooms were so dismal that all the wealth of the Indies would not be payment enough for him to stay. So, as there was no one to tempt him by offering him such wealth, he left, and since then it had been empty. Some stone had been taken away from the place and used to make walls; and, indeed, sometimes they had talked of pulling the house down altogether, for the sake of the materials.