Bleak and wind-swept is the little town of Kirkby-Malhouse, harsh and forbidding are the fells upon which it stands. It stretches in a single line of grey-stone, slate-roofed houses, dotted down the furze-clad slope of the rolling .
In this lonely and village, I, James Upperton, found myself in the summer of ’85. Little as the hamlet had to offer, it contained that for which I above all things—seclusion and freedom from all which might distract my mind from the high and weighty subjects which engaged it. But the of my made my and I to seek new quarters.
As it chanced, I had in one of my come upon an in the very heart of these lonely , which I at once determined should be my own. It was a two-roomed cottage, which had once belonged to some shepherd, but had long been , and was rapidly to ruin. In the winter floods, the Gaster Beck, which runs down Gaster Fell, where the little dwelling stood, had overswept its banks and torn away a part of the wall. The roof was in ill case, and the lay thick amongst the grass. Yet the main shell of the house stood firm and true; and it was no great task for me to have all that was amiss set right.
The two rooms I laid out in a widely different manner—my own tastes are of a turn, and the outer was so planned as to accord with them. An oil-stove by Rippingille of Birmingham furnished me with the means of cooking; while two great bags, the one of flour, and the other of potatoes, made me independent of all supplies from without. In diet I had long been a Pythagorean, so that the scraggy, long-limbed sheep which upon the wiry grass by the Gaster Beck had little to fear from their new companion. A nine-gallon cask of oil served me as a sideboard; while a square table, a deal chair and a truckle-bed completed the list of my domestic fittings. At the head of my couch hung two unpainted shelves—the lower for my dishes and cooking , the upper for the few portraits which took me back to the little that was pleasant in the long, wearisome for wealth and for pleasure which had marked the life I had left behind.
If this dwelling-room of mine were plain even to squalor, its poverty was more than for by the luxury of the chamber which was to serve me as my study. I had ever held that it was best for my mind to be surrounded by such objects as would be in harmony with the studies which occupied it, and that the loftiest and most ethereal conditions of thought are only possible amid surroundings which please the eye and gratify the senses. The room which I had set apart for my mystic studies was set in a style as gloomy and as the thoughts and with which it was to harmonise. Both walls and ceilings were covered with a paper of the richest and black, on which was traced a and pattern of dead gold. A black curtain covered the single diamond-paned window; while a thick, yielding carpet of the same material prevented the sound of my own footfalls, as I paced backward and forward, from breaking the current of my thought. Along the cornices ran gold rods, from which depended six pictures, all of the sombre and imaginative caste, which chimed best with my fancy.
And yet it was destined that ere ever I reached this quiet harbour I should learn that I was still one of humankind, and that it is an ill thing to strive to break the bond which us to our fellows. It was but two nights before the date p. 148I had upon for my change of dwelling, when I was conscious of a in the house beneath, with the bearing of heavy burdens up the creaking stair, and the harsh voice of my landlady, loud in welcome and protestations of joy. From time to time, amid the whirl of words, I could hear a gentle and softly voice, which struck pleasantly upon my ear after the long weeks during which I had listened only to the rude dialect of the dalesmen. For an hour I co............