No two boys ever had brighter homes, for their dwellings were here--Josh Carlile's at the Vicarage, planted on a shelf where the arrow-spired church looked down from near the head of the dale, where the first fall plunged wildly full thirty feet beside the little, mossy, stone-walled burial-ground. It was the home of mosses of every tint, from the high-up, metallic green in the cracks among the stones, down to the soft pink and cream patches of sphagnum, sometimes of their own vivid green when charged with water ready to spurt out at the touch of a traveller's foot. Will's home--nest, he called it--was far below, at the mill, that pleasant home built first by one of his exiled ancestors, an old Huguenot who fled from France full of fervour, for his religion's sake, seeking refuge in old England, where, like many others, he found a safe asylum to live in peace, and think. Old Guillaume Villars had "Monsieur" written before his name; but he was one of France's fine old working gentlemen, a great silk-weaver, and his first thought was to find a place where he and his following, a little clan, could earn their bread as sturdy workers living by the work of their hands; no beggars nor parasites they, but earnest toilers, the men who introduced their industry every here and there. Some two hundred years ago, old Guillaume found Belle Dale ready with its motive power to his hand. He wanted water for his silk-mill: there it was, and, in a small way, he and his began their toil. Their nearest neighbours, few indeed, soon found them quiet, earnest, religious men, and the welcome they had was warm. In their gratitude they said, "France to us is dead; this in future is our home;" and, though clinging to their language, they cast aside their fine patrician names, making them English and homely like those of the dwellers near. There was something almost grotesque at times in the changes that they made, but they were not noticed here. The D'aubignes became Daubeneys, or homely Dobbs; Chapuis, Shoppee; Jean Boileau, the great silk-weaver's right hand, laughingly translated his name to Drinkwater; and, as the time went on and generations passed, a descendant, "disagreeable old Boil O!" as the two boys called him, was the odd man, Jack-of-all-trades, and general mechanician at Beldale Mill, the servant of old Guillaume Villars' son, many generations down--John Willows now, father of Will of the Mill. A long piece of pedigree this, but we must say who's who, and what's what, and, by the same rule, where's where; so here we have Beldale Mill and the boys--just the place they loved and looked forward to reaching again from the great school at Worksop, when the holidays came round.