Category: Historical Novels

Ben o' Bill's, the Luddite: A Yorkshire Tale

IT HURTS me sore that folk in these days should so little understand the doings of us Luddites. To hear young people talk, the Luddites were miscreants that well, deserved the hanging they got--a set of idle, dissolute knaves and cut-throats the country was well rid of. Nay, w...

Chapters

1. CHAPTER I.

IT HURTS me sore that folk in these days should so little understand the doings of us Luddites. To hear young people talk, the Luddites were miscreants that well, deserved the h...

7. CHAPTER VII.

YOU may be sure such doings as those of which I have written were country's talk. People talked about nothing else. Wherever you sent you heard of misery and want and of the men...

12. CHAPTER XII.

I HAD got my affairs into, a pretty tangle, and for the life of me I could not see my way out of the mess. I lived in daily terror of arrest. I was not even supported by what ap...

11. CHAPTER XI.

MAY came, sweet, fair and smiling. The crops bade fair to be good, and we looked forward to hay-making time with every assurance of a rich harvest. Everything was quiet as quiet...

8. CHAPTER VIII.

IT WAS nigh ten o'clock of the Saturday night when I slipped on my clothes, went on tiptoe across the bedroom floor into the little room where 'Siah slept--how the rafters creak...

4. CHAPTER IV.

IN February of 1812, it was borne in upon our minds that something more than distress and disaffection were in our midst. These we were used to, and they had come to seem matter...

9. CHAPTER IX.

MY Father and Siah left home that very day with the waggon. It was given out in the little village that I was gone too, and it was soon town's talk that Mrs. Bamforth was sick a...

5. CHAPTER V

THE last day of March of that year of 1812 was a big day for me. I came of age. It would little seem me to say what mariner of man I was in the flush and vigour of my early manh...

3. CHAPTER III.

IT WAS the Christmas Eve of 1811, a night beautiful, bright and clear. The moon was high in the heavens, and a myriad stars gemmed the sky. Flakes of snow fell gently, like the...

2. CHAPTER II.

IT WAS not often my father missed the Audit Dinner at the Dartmouth Arms, but for some reason I do not remember, he could not go to the November Audit of 1811. So I went in his...

6. CHAPTER VI.

It must not be supposed, because I have turned aside to tell of my own poor affairs, that the Luddites were idle all this while. Indeed it is very difficult for me to give any n...

13. CHAPTER XIII.

I NEVER in my life passed so gloomy a Christmas as that of 1812. We killed a goose as usual, and there was the usual seasoned pudding and plum pudding, and Faith and Mary made a...

14. CHAPTER XIV.

AFTER this, life for many months was very grey at Holme. We did not talk much about the grim days we had passed through. They were pleasant neither to talk of nor think on. My f...

10. CHAPTER X.

I HAVE told how I met Justice Radcliffe and what he said to me. That was after I was better and about. But many things had happened before that, of which I have yet to tell, and...