was always the grandest of landscape gardeners, and here she may
be said to have excelled. Her work had been very simply done: some time
or other when the world was young the Great Gray Tor must have split in
two, forming one vast jagged gash hundreds of feet deep, whose walls so
nearly matched, that, if by some earthquake pressure force had been
applied, they would have fitted together, crushing in the verdant
growth, and the vast Tor would have been itself again.

But, needless to say, this had never happened, and the lovely place, so
well named, became Belle Dale.

High up in the Pennine Range the waters gathered in the great reservoirs
of bog and moss to form a stream, an infant river, which ran clear as
crystal, of a golden hue, right down the bottom of the gorge; here
trickling and singing musically, there spreading into a rocky pool,
plunging down into fall after fall, to gather again into black, dark
hollows as if to gain force for its next spring; and nowhere in England
did moss, fern, and water-plant grow to greater perfection than here,
watered as they were by the soft, fall-made mists.

All through the summer the place was full of soft, dark nooks, and
golden hollows shaded by birch, through whose pensile twigs the sunshine
seemed to fall in showers of golden rain--cascades of light that plunged
into the transparent waters, and flashed from the scales of the
ruddy-spotted trout.

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 t