So long as this waste land was tenanted only by the “owl and the bittern,” Legal Rights slumbered. The moment man put his foot upon it the ogre woke up, for it is not permitted to that miserable two-legged creature to rest in peace anywhere in this realm. The village of Wolf’s Glow was distant about a mile and a quarter from the old willow tree whose fall had dammed up the brook and caused the marsh. The brook, in fact, ran past the village, and supplied more than one farmhouse with water. These farms were of the poorest class—mere stretches of pasture-land, and such pasture which a well-fed donkey would despise! The poorest farm, in appearance at all events, was Wick—a large but tumbledown place, roofed with grey slates, which, stood apart from the village. It was the largest house in the place, and yet seemed the most poverty-stricken. The grey slates were falling off. The roof-tree had cracked and bent, the lattice windows were broken, and the holes stuffed up with bundles of hay and straw. The garden was choked with weeds, and the very apple trees in the orchard were withering away. Old Sibbold, the owner and occupier, was detested by the entire village, and by no one more than his two sons. He was a miser, and yet nothing seemed to prosper with him; and pare and save as much as he would he could make no accumulation. His sons were the only labourers he employed, though his farm was the largest thereabouts, and he paid them only in lodging and food, and not much of the latter. The eldest, Arthur, chafed bitterly under this treatment, for he appears, from the scanty records that remain of him, to have been a lad of spirit and energy. The second son, James, was of a grosser nature, and his mind was chiefly occupied with eating and drinking. He had an implicit faith in the wealth of his father, and submitted patiently to all these hardships and rough treatment in the hope of ingratiating himself with the old man, and perhaps supplanting Arthur in his will—that is, so far as his money was concerned, for the land, as the villagers said, “went by heirship”—i.e. was entailed—but who would care for such land? Arthur saw the game and did nothing to prevent it; on the contrary, he took a certain pleasure in irritating the savage and morose old man, whom he thoroughly despised. Perhaps what happened in the future was a punishment for this unfilial conduct, however much it was provoked. The mother, it must be understood, had long been dead, and there was no mediator between the stern old man and his fiery-tempered son. Old Sibbold was descended of a good family—one that had once held a position, not only in the county but in the country—and he dwelt much on the past, recalling the time when a Sibbold had held a bishop a prisoner for King John.