Barbara Lynn: A Tale of the Dales and Fells.

After many weeks of silence, the beck sang once more at the door of Greystones. The sound stole upon the ear so imperceptibly, with the slackening of the frost, that Barbara was...

The swift night came down; fells and dales were folded in purple gloom. Stars began to shine, and Barbara, eating her supper of coarse bread, let her eyes wander from group to g...

Joel had friends after his own heart scattered through the countryside--young men with small estates and little education like himself. They forgathered in each other's houses,...

Lucy was still lying fast asleep in bed. Barbara called softly, "Lucy, Lucy," but there was no reply. Then she laid her hand upon the sleeper's breast. Some hands have a power t...

Winter came to the dale, bringing snow, wind, and rain. It sneaked into the sheep-fold like a wolf, and not only into the sheep-fold, but it went down to the village, and quietl...

Lucy was standing before the kitchen looking-glass, pinning a flower into the bosom of her cotton gown. She glanced up with a curl of rebellion on her lips, then tossed her head...

"Great-granny has been very generous--for her," said Lucy, as she bade Joel good-night in the copse below the house. "Fancy her giving you a whole sovereign! Doesn't it make you...

Barbara was driving sheep on the fells above Cringel Forest. She looked down and saw the trees bourgeoning into leaf, and rising out of them, on the top of a jutting crag, the o...

The cow-house was dim, like night, when a cloudy moon is shining, although the clock had just struck four. Through a small window the grey light stole and vaguely lit up the hor...

Lucy sat on the bridge that spanned the beck just above the farm. The water had diminished to a thin stream, trickling between the stones; the pools were nearly empty; the moss...

Thundergay glimmered through the green twilight with his hoary head under the Pole star, and his feet in the wan waters of a tarn. His breath was the North wind.

Barbara was alone at Ketel's Parlour. A lighted lamp hung from a hook in the ceiling, and a fire smouldered on a slab of blue slate, while the smoke escaped through a cleft in t...

Joel Hart returned to the dale on the day of the Shepherds' Meet. The coach set him down at an inn, twenty miles from High Fold, in the small hours of the morning; and, having h...

Barbara sat on a stool in the mouth of the cave, reading aloud Pope's translation of the Iliad to Timothy Hadwin. The old man watched the girl narrowly, and felt his mind swing...

Flames leaped up the chimney at Greystones, and filled the kitchen with a ruddy glow. The shutters had been taken down, but the night seemed still to hug the window-panes, and a...

Joel looked in at Greystones on his way to the Shepherds' Meet. He would rather have passed the house by, for he was in no mood to talk to Mistress Lynn, but he did not like to...

Lucy lay upon the fellside, face down in the grass, hidden by the bracken fronds. The sun was setting, and the mountains were suffused with a rosy haze. Over the roof of Forest...

Joel Hart sat on a bench, staring at the fire in the kitchen of the Shepherd's Rest. Timothy Hadwin was bending over a basket of moss and late mountain flowers, dissecting them...

Joel would not hear of it. The good-wife was in the house, he said, and she had a tongue for babbling that would challenge any mountain beck. But in that wild and rock-strewn pa...

Some days passed before Lucy was well enough to leave the Shepherd's Rest. She had got a severe chill from her exposure to the night air and the vapours of the marsh, but her na...

The night was dark, no star shone, and, though the moon had risen, it could not penetrate the clouds, which hung over the sky, and rested on the mountain tops. There was just en...

Peter Fleming sat by his study window, looking down into the quadrangle. It was early morning, so early that stars still glimmered round Saint Mary the Virgin's spire and over t...

"Good-bye, Lucy," said Peter. He was standing at the mill-house door, while a man held his horse at the gate. "I wish you hadn't changed your mind," he continued, "and were comi...

The winter was one of storms. They rose suddenly towards evening, and continued intermittently throughout the night, with long, strange pauses between each, until the dawn of th...

It was the spring of the next year, and Joel Hart sat smoking outside the store of Red Rivers Town. The hunters and trappers were returning from the forest, bringing in their wi...