held by the farmer who lives in the remains of Howley
Hall are stone houses of to-day, occupied by the people who are making
their living and their fortunes by the woollen mills that encroach upon
and shoulder out the proprietors of the ancient halls. These are to be
seen in every direction, picturesque, many-gabled, with heavy stone
carvings of coats of arms for heraldic ornament; belonging to decayed
families, from whose ancestral lands field after field has been shorn
away, by the urgency of rich manufacturers pressing hard upon necessity.

A smoky atmosphere surrounds these old dwellings of former Yorkshire
squires, and blights and blackens the ancient trees that overshadow them;
cinder-paths lead up to them; the ground round about is sold for building
upon; but still the neighbours, though they subsist by a different state
of things, remember that their forefathers lived in agricultural
dependence upon the owners of these halls; and treasure up the traditions
connected with the stately households that existed centuries ago. Take
Oakwell Hall, for instance. It stands in a pasture-field, about a
quarter of a mile from the high road. It is but that distance from the
busy whirr of the steam-engines employed in the woollen mills at
Birstall; and if you walk to it from Birstall Station about meal-time,
you encounter strings of mill-hands, blue with woollen dye, and cranching
in hungry haste over the cinder-paths bordering the high road. Turning
off from this to the right, you ascend through an old pasture-field, and
enter a short by-road, called the "Bloody Lane"--a walk haunted by the
ghost of a certain Captain Batt, the reprobate proprietor of an old hall
close by, in the days of the Stuarts. From the "Bloody Lane,"
overshadowed by trees, you come into the field in which Oakwell Hall is
situated. It is known in the neighbourhood to be the place described as
"Field Head," Shirley's residence. The enclosure in front, half court,
half garden; the panelled hall, with the gallery opening into the bed-
chambers running round; the barbarous peach-coloured drawing-room; the
bright look-out through the garden-door upon the grassy lawns and
terraces behind, where the soft-hued pigeons still love to coo and strut
in the sun,--are described in "Shirley." The scenery of that fiction
lies close around; the real events which suggested it took place in the
immediate neighbourhood.

They show a bloody footprint in a bed-chamb