LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume V, Issue 541, 13 March 1876, Page 3

LITERATURE.

FLUTE 11 MOUSE WELL. ( Cham hers’ Jon rtial. ) Chapter I. The manuscript which I here transcribe came into my possession accidentally, and in a rather curious way; and as I think it may prove interesting to some readers of this journal, I have copied it for publication. The manner in which I became possessed of it is simply as follows. Last autumn I hired a farm house in an obscure part of the southcoast for the shooting season, Dunmoor Manor, as it was called, was gloomy, dilapidated, and unprepossessing in appearance. It had been long uutenanted; the people of the surrounding neighbourhood being, for some reason, prejudiced against the place. It suited my purpose, however, I had it comfortably furnished, and the bachelor friend who came down to share my quarters and my sport was pleased to approve of the antique aspect of the rooms, which I had left unviolated by the touch of any renovating hand. It was whilst II and I were

examining the old fashioned wainscoting of what I had made my smoking room, that we discovered a recess in the wall, closed in by a clumsily sliding panel, from which we drew forth the document which is now in my possession. It was much discoloured, and covered with dust and cobwebs ; and we could with difficulty decipher the cramped and faded hand-writing; but the following is a correct transcript of its contents.

From a child, I was always imaginative. Darkness would suggest to me the strangest phantoms. The steep hillside which frowned upon my home seemed to me a mighty giant; the dark clouds, which swept across the heavens, fierce monsters. I delighted in creating fanciful shapes out of the gloamin, when, in long winter evenings, I sat in the deep window-seat, watching the swaying of the sycamore branches, and listening to the dreary sighing of the wind among the leaves. Perhaps the tendency was increased by the lonely life I led, and by the total lack of companionship with boys of my own age. Mine was the old story of a craving for education, where education was out of the question. Every book that remained of my grandfather’s library I had read again and again, poring each time with fresh excitement over the history of adventures, probable and improbable, therein contained. I had many opportunities of gratifying my morbid tastes, and my grandfather cared little how I passed my days. His life had been a more checkered one than lin my youth suspected, and was now drawing near its end; as far as any active business was concerned, it had ended. There remained to him now but to wait in patience by his fireside until the day should come when he should be called upon to lay aside his burden. As for my Aunt Barbara (the only other inmate of the house, save Deborah the old servant), her days were spent in one long sad retrospect; her eyes seemed ever to be looking far away into the past, her voice sounded muffled and low, and her step was like the traditional ghost ly footstep that haunts a deserted corridor. With such uncongenial companions, what wonder that I fell back upon my own resources. My chief diversion was in wandering about the country; my best friend the dreary hillside, a moonlight ramble my keenest enjoyment. Often at midnight, I used to creep out of the ivied casement of mj little room, and roam up to the dark pine woods, and along the crest of the hill, where the tufted juniper bushes crop out of the deserted chalk-pits, and in the daytime, the daws congregate and chatter to their young. If any of the household knew of these nocturnal excursions, they, at anyrate, did not trouble themselves to put a stop to them. This was my life from a child. In my earliest recollections my homo was the gable ended manor house, fast falling into decay, flanked by the long lines of tall yew hedges, which darken the windows with their gloomy intensity. The sighing of the wind in the sycamore trees was the first sound that ever fell on my ears, and it is likely to fall on them on the day of my death. The seclusion of our existence may be better imagined when I mention that the nearest village was five miles distant, and that there was no proper road of communication between it and us. Fields and woods lie before the house, the hill rises behind it, and on the right the gray moors stretch out for about two miles, where they terminate abruptly in high cliffs, washed at the base by the restless waves of the sea. Strange to say, those cliffs, and the shore beneath them, though so near, were unknown ground to me. I was familiar with the hillside, and with the country for] miles round, yet I never dared to venture near the sea. The reason for this circumstance, it will take me some time to explain. Years ago, in my early childhood, a race of men infested these shores who were the scourge of all the country round. They were called smugglers ; but they were very different from the smugglers we hear of in those days, who now and then hide a keg or two of brandy, or a few bales of lace, in some secret nook along the coast. The smugglers of my grandfather’s time much more resembled bandit robbers, only that their stronghold, instead of being the depth of the forest, was the open sea; for, not content with secreting contraband goods in the caves with which these cliffs abound, they made raids into the country, plundering the homesteads, and even pressing th« farmers’ sons into their service. As was natural, these aggressions stored up the strongest anl most bitter animosity in the hearts of the landsmen; and many were the struggles which took place in those days upon cliff and shore, with varied result, and sometimes with loss of life on both sides.

My grandfather was a man capable of strong feelings of revenge. His farm had been plundered more than once, and all that he most valued carried away ; and he vowed vengeance on the men who had despoiled him. Now it is that I come to the darkest page in his life. He had always been considered a harsh, stern man in his own household. It is reported that his wife pined away through ill-treatment, and of the three sons she had borne him, two had come to a bad end. The third lived at home for a time, and I believe my grandfather to have been, in his stem way, much attached to him. When still quite young, however, this son offended him, by marrying otherwise than had been intended; and for about a year he and his young wife had a hard life of it. At the end of that time, the father and son came to an open rupture, and the latter fled, no one knew whither. When next he was heard of, it was as one of the smuggler gang. 1 To be continued.']