Joe's story opens in that unclassical region, the Isle of Axholme,--a section of Lincolnshire divided from the main body of the county by the broad and far extending stream of the Trent. Insular situations are invariably held to give some peculiarity of manners to their inhabitants; and the Axholmians, or "Men of the Isle," have always been reckoned to be an odd sort of, plain kind of people, by the other inhabitants of Lindsey, the great northern division of the shire, of which the Isle is accounted a part. This was more emphatically true of them seventy years ago; and the face of the country was, at that time, much in keeping with the unpolished character of the Axholmian people. A journey through the Isle, in the autumnal and winter months especially, would then have been studiously avoided by a traveller acquainted with its excessively bad roads, rendered insufferably disagreeable by the stench of the sodden "line" or flax, with which the broad ditches on each side of the rural ways were filled. Low, thatched abodes, built of "stud and mud,"--or wood and clay, were the prevailing description of human dwellings scattered over the land; and swine were the animals most commonly kept and fattened by the farmers and peasantry. The two considerable villages of Owston and Crowle (pronounced _Crool_ by the euphonious Axholmians), together with the town of Epworth, the modern capital of the Isle, were the only localities in Axholme to which improvements, common in the rest of the shire, had then penetrated. Haxey, the ancient capital of the district, meanwhile, remained unvisited by the spirit of modern change, and drew its only distinction from the historic associations connected with its decay. In remote times, and under its Saxon appellation of "Axel," the town had been fortified with a castle of the Mowbrays, to a chief of which chivalrous race the greater part of "the Isle of Axelholm" was given as a manor, by the Norman conqueror. And, amid the straggling and irregular assemblage of buildings which now form the village, an intelligent visitor would discover indubitable evidence of the former importance of the place. Its large church, displaying the rich architecture prevalent during the wars of the Roses, and supporting a lofty tower resonant at stated hours with chimes of loud and pleasing music, looks from an eminence, almost in cathedral state, over the greater extent of the Isle; and a few ample and curiously built houses of some centuries old,--affording a striking contrast to the paltry erections of the day,--denote the ancient denizens of Haxey to have been the principal possessors of comparative wealth, and, it may be added, of the soil in the neighbourhood.