ood for high adventures, and his surroundings were romantic enough to
stir the blood.

Cloom Manor, a deep-roofed, heavy-mullioned pile of grey granite dating
from the Restoration, presented a long, low front to the moorland, a
front beautified by a pillared porch with the Ruan arms sculptured above
it, and at the back it was built round a square court, from which an
arch, hollowed through the house itself, led into the farmyard. The
windows were low-browed and deep-set, thickly leaded into small squares,
with an occasional pane of bottle glass, which winked like an eye
rounded by amaze. Within, the wide fireplaces and ceilings were enriched
by delicate mouldings, whose once clean-cut outlines were blurred to a
pleasing, uncertain quality by successive coats of whitewash. The room
where Ishmael had been born boasted a domed ceiling, and a band of
moulding half-way up the walls culminated over the bed's head in a
representation of the Crucifixion--the drooping Christ surrounded by a
medley of soldiers and horses, curiously intent dogs and swooning women,
above whose heads the fluttered angels seemed entangled in the host of
pennons flaunting round the cross. Cloom was a house of neglected
glories, of fine things fallen on base uses, like the family itself.
When James Ruan came into his inheritance it was still a gentleman's
estate; when he died it was a mere farm. A distorted habit of mind and
the incredible difficulties of communication in the remote West during
the first half of the nineteenth century had gradually caused James Ruan
to sink his gentlehood in a wilful boorishness that left him a fierce
pride of race and almost feudal powers, but the tastes and habits of his
own labourers. As for the life of his mind, it was concentrated entirely
on money-making; and all that he made he invested, till he became the
most important landowner for miles, and in a district where no farms
were very large his manor lands and cottage property and his nine
hundred pounds or so of income made him a figure not to be ignored.

Nevertheless, for all his prosperity, he was a hard master, paying his
labourers, who were mostly married men with families, the wage of seven
shillings a week, and employing their womenfolk at hoeing or binding for
sixpence a day, while for fewer pence still the little children stumbled
on uncertain legs after the birds which threatened the new-tilled crops.
By such means--common to all his neighbours at a ti