t.
Yet every furlong of the drive was earmarked for me, as it were, by some
detail perfectly familiar. The high-road ran straight ahead to a notch
in the long chine of Huel Tor; and this notch was filled with the yellow
ball of the westering sun. Whenever I turned my head and blinked, red
simulacra of this ball hopped up and down over the brown moors. Miles
of wasteland, dotted with peat-ricks and cropping ponies, stretched to
the northern horizon: on our left three long coombes radiated seaward,
and in the gorge of the midmost was a building stuck like a fish-bone,
its twisted Jacobean chimneys overtopping a plantation of ash-trees that
now, in November, allowed a glimpse, and no more, of the grey facade. I
had looked down that coombe as we drove by; and catching sight of these
chimneys felt something like reassurance, as if I had been counting, all
the way, to find them there.

But here let me explain who I am and what brought me to these parts.
My name is Samuel Wraxall--the Reverend Samuel Wraxall, to be precise:
I was born a Cockney and educated at Rugby and Oxford. On leaving the
University I had taken orders; but, for reasons impertinent to this
narrative, was led, after five years of parochial work in Surrey, to
accept an Inspectorship of Schools. Just now I was bound for Pitt's
Scawens, a desolate village among the Cornish clay-moors, there to
examine and report upon the Board School. Pitt's Scawens lies some nine
miles off the railway, and six from the nearest market-town;
consequently, on hearing there was a comfortable inn near the village, I
had determined to make that my resting-place for the night and do my
business early on the morrow.

"Who lives down yonder?" I asked my driver.

"Squire Parkyn," he answered, not troubling to follow my gaze.

"Old family?"

"May be: Belonged to these parts before I can mind."

"What's the place called?"

"Tremenhuel."

I had certainly never heard the name before, nevertheless my lips were
forming the syllables almost before he spoke. As he flicked up his grey
horse and the gig began to oscillate in more business-like fashion, I
put him a fourth question--a question at once involuntary and absurd.

"Are you sure the people who live there are called Parkyn?"

He turned his head at this, and treated me quite excusably to a stare of
amazement.

"Well--considerin' I've lived in these parts five-an'-forty year, man
and boy, I reckon I _ought_ to be sure.