Produced by ellinora, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) SUSSEX GORSE _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ THE TRAMPING METHODIST STARBRACE SPELL LAND ISLE OF THORNS THREE AGAINST THE WORLD SAMUEL RICHARDSON WILLOW'S FORGE AND OTHER POEMS SUSSEX GORSE THE STORY OF A FIGHT BY SHEILA KAYE-SMITH [Illustration: Decoration] NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXVI CONTENTS PAGE PROLOGUE. THE CHALLENGE 1 BOOK I THE BEGINNING OF THE FIGHT 22 BOOK II THE WOMAN'S PART 78 BOOK III THE ELDER CHILDREN 120 BOOK IV TREACHERIES 192 BOOK V ALMOST UNDER 243 BOOK VI STRUGGLING UP 331 BOOK VII THE END IN SIGHT 382 BOOK VIII THE VICTORY 432 SUSSEX GORSE PROLOGUE THE CHALLENGE § 1. Boarzell Fair had been held every year on Boarzell Moor for as long as the oldest in Peasmarsh could remember. The last Thursday in October was the date, just when the woods were crumpling into brown, and fogs blurred the wavy sunsets. The Moor was on the eastern edge of the parish, five miles from Rye. Heaving suddenly swart out of the green water-meadows by Socknersh, it piled itself towards the sunrise, dipping to Leasan House. It was hummocked and tussocked with coarse grass--here and there a spread of heather, growing, like all southern heather, almost arboreally. In places the naked soil gaped in sores made by coney-warrens or uprooted bushes. Stones and roots, sharn, shards, and lumps of marl, mixed themselves into the wealden clay, which oozed in red streaks of potential fruitfulness through their sterility. The crest of Boarzell was marked by a group of firs, very gaunt and wind-bitten, rising out of a mass of gorse, as the plumes of some savage chief might nod mangily above his fillet. When the gorse was in bloom, one caught the flare of it from the Kentish hills, or away westward from Brightling and Dallington. This day in the October of 1835, the flowerets were either nipped or scattered, or hidden by the cloths the gipsies had spread to dry on the bushes.