Romantic enough is the scene, which, in a manner, framed the display
of a most human drama; and fraught it is, even to this day, in the
eyes of any but the least imaginative, with potentialities for strange
happenings.[A] It is that great bight of Morecambe; that vast of brown
and white shallows, deserted, silent, mysterious, and treacherous with
its dreaded shifting sands; fringed in the inland distance by the
Cumbrian hills, blue and misty; bordered outwards by the Irish sea,
cold and grey. And in a corner of that waste, the islet, small and
green and secure, with its ancient Peel, ruinous even as the noble
abbey of which it was once the dependant stronghold; with its still
sturdy keep, and the beacon, whose light-keeper was once a Dreamer of
Beautiful Things._

[Footnote A: _Those who like to associate fiction with definite places
may be interested to know that the prototype of Scarthey is the_ Piel
of Foudrey, _on the North Lancashire coast, near the edge of Morecambe
Bay, and that Pulwick was suggested by Furness Abbey. Barrow-in-Furness
was then but a straggling village. A floating light, facing the mouth
of the Wyre, now fulfils the duties devolving on the beacon of Scarthey
at the time of this story._]

_And romantic the times, if by that word is implied a freer scope than
can be found in modern years for elemental passions, for fighting and
loving in despite of every-day conventions; for enterprise, risks,
temptations unknown in the atmosphere of humdrum peace and order. They
are the early days of the century, days when easy and rapid means of
communication had not yet destroyed all the glamour of distance, when
a county like Lancashire was as a far-off country, with a spirit, a
language, customs and ideas unknown to the Metropolis; days when, if
there were no lifeboat crews, there could still be found rather
experienced "wreckers," and when the keeping of a beacon, to light a
dangerous piece of sea, was still within the province of a
public-spirited landlord. They are the days when the spread of
education had not even yet begun (for weal or for woe) its levelling
work; days of cruel monopolies and inane prohibitions, and ferocious
penal laws, inept in the working, baleful in the result; days of
keel-hauling and flogging; when the "free-trader" still swung, tarred
and in chains, on conspicuous points of the coast--even as the
highwayman rattled at the cross-road--for the encouragement of the
brotherhood; when