on-gray rock, half covered with a growth
of deep-green stunted cedars.

At the head or northern extremity of the vale springs a cascade, called,
for the darkness of its color, the Black Torrent. It rushes, roaring,
down the side of the precipice, now hiding under a heavy growth of
evergreen, now bursting into light as it foams over the face of some
rock, until at length it tumbles down to the foot of the mountain and
flows along through the bottom of the Valley, until about half way down
its length, it widens into a little lake, called, from its hue, the
Black Water, or the Black Pond; then narrowing again, it flows on down
past the little hamlet of Blackville, situated at the foot or southern
extremity of the Black Valley.

The ancient manor house, known as the Black Hall, stands on a rising
ground on the west side of the Black Water with its old pleasure gardens
running down to the very edge of the lake.

It is a large, rambling, irregularly-formed old house, built of the iron
gray rocks dug from the home quarries; and it is scarcely to be
distinguished from the iron-gray precipices that tower all around it.

The manor had been in the possession of the same family from the time of
King James the First, who made a grant of the land to Reginald Berners,
the first Lord of the Manor.

Bertram Berners was the seventh in descent from Reginald. He married
first a lady of high rank, the daughter of the colonial governor of
Virginia. This union, which was neither fruitful nor happy, lasted more
than thirty years, after which the high-born wife died.

Finding himself at the age of sixty a childless widower and the last of
his name, he resolved to marry again in the hope of having heirs. He
chose for his second wife a young lady of good but impoverished family,
the orphan niece of a neighboring planter.

But the new wife only half fulfilled her husband's hopes, when, a year
after their marriage, she presented him with one fair daughter, the
Sybil of our story.

Even this gift cost the delicate mother her life; for although she did
not die immediately, yet from the day of Sybil's birth, she fell into a
long and lingering decline which finally terminated in death.

Old Bertram Berners was nearly seventy years of age, when he laid his
young wife in her early grave. Although he had been grievously
disappointed in his hopes of a male heir, yet he was not mad enough, at
his advanced period of life, to try matrimony again. He