Ernest Maltravers Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ERNEST MALTRAVERS. CHAPTER I. " My meaning in't, I protest, was Tery honest in Ihe behalf of the maid.... yet, who would have suspected an ambush where I was taken? " All's Well thai Ends Well. Act iv. Scene 3. Some four miles distant from one of our northern manufacturing towns, in the year 18 -- , was a wide and desolate common ; -- a more dreary spot it is impossible to conceive -- the herbage grew up in sickly patches from the midst of a black and stony soil. Not a tree was to be seen in the whole of the comfortless expanse. Nature herself had seemed to desert the solitude, as if scared by the ceaseless din of the neighbouring forges, and even Art, which presses all things into service, had disdained to cull use or beauty from these unpromising demesnes. There was something weird and primaeval in the aspect of the place. Especially when in the long nights of winter you beheld the distant fires and lights, which give to the vicinity of certain manufactories so preternatural an appearance, streaming red and wild over the waste. So abandoned by man appeared the spot, that you found it difficult to imagine that it was only from human fires that its bleak and barren desolation was illumined. For miles along the moor you detected no vestige of any habitation ; but as you approached the verge nearest to the town, you could just perceive at a little distance from the main road, by which the common was intersected, a small, solitary, and miserable hovel. Within this lone abode, at the time in which my story opens, were seated two persons. The one was a man of about fifty years of age , and in a squalid and wretched garb which was yet relieved by an affectation of ill-sorted finery: a silk handkerchief, which boasted the ornament of a large brooch of false stones,...Read More