lane. One course
leads headlong down another steep hill--so steep that unwary travellers
usually descend from their carriages to walk up or down it, and thus
are enabled to ensure relief to their horses and a chill to themselves
at the same time; for it is hot work walking up or down that sunny
precipice, and the cold winds of Mershire await one with equal gusto at
the top and at the bottom. At the foot of the hill stretches a breezy
common, wide enough to make one think "long, long thoughts"; and if the
traveller looks backward when he has crossed this common, he will see
Sedgehill Church, crowning and commanding the vast expanse, and pointing
heavenward with its slender spire to remind him, and all other wayfaring
men, that the beauty and glory of this present world is only an earnest
and a foretaste of something infinitely fairer.

The second course of the irresolute lane is less adventurous, and
wanders peacefully through Badgering Woods, a dark and delightful spot,
once mysterious enough to be a fitting hiding-place for the age-long
slumbers of some sleeping princess. As a matter of fact, so it was; the
princess was black but comely, and her name was Coal. There she had
slept for a century of centuries, until Prince Iron needed and sought
and found her, and awakened her with the noise of his kisses. So now the
wood is not asleep any more, but is filled with the tramping of the
prince's men. The old people wring their hands and mourn that the former
things are passing away, and that Mershire's youthful beauty will soon
be forgotten; but the young people laugh and are glad, because they know
that life is greater than beauty, and that it is by her black
coalfields, and not by her green woodlands, that Mershire will save her
people from poverty, and will satisfy her poor with bread.

When Elisabeth Farringdon was a girl, the princess was still asleep in
the heart of the wood, and no prince had yet attempted to disturb her;
and the lane passed through a forest of silence until it came to a dear
little brown stream, which, by means of a dam, was turned into a moat,
encircling one of the most ancient houses in England. The Moat House had
been vacant for some time, as the owner was a delicate man who preferred
to live abroad; and great was the interest at Sedgehill when, a year or
two after Elisabeth left school, it was reported that a stranger, Alan
Tremaine by name, had taken the Moat House for the sake of the hunting,