Shining Ferry

me, and one day, as he lounged at church in his great pew, his eye fell on Rachel Rosewarne, a gipsy-looking girl, sitting under the gallery. This Rachel's father was a fisherman, tall of stature, who planted himself one night in the road as my lord galloped homeward to Damelioc. The horse shied, and the rider was thrown. Rosewarne picked him up, dusted his lace coat carefully, and led him aside into this very field of Parc-an-hal. No one knows what talk they held there, but on his lordship's dying, in 1712, of wounds received in a duel in Hyde Park, Rachel Rosewarne produced a deed, which the widow's lawyers did not contest, and entered Hall as its mistress, with her son Charles-- then five years old.

Rachel Rosewarne died in 1760 at the age of seventy-six, leaving a grim reputation, which survived for another hundred years in the talk of the countryside. While she lived, her grip on the estate never relaxed. Her son grew up a mere hind upon the home-farm. When he reached twenty-five, she saddled her