Chapter 2

THE PEOPLE OF THE STORY

Slowly, steadily, to and fro,
Swings our life in its weary way;
Now at its ebb, and now at its flow,
And the evening and morning make up the day.

Sorrow and happiness, peace and strife,
Fear and rejoicing its moments know;
Yet from the discords of such a life,
The clearest music of heaven may flow.

Duty led John Hatton to take the quickest road to Hatton-in-Elmete, a
small manufacturing town in a lovely district in Yorkshire. In Saxon
times it was covered with immense elm forests from which it was
originally called Elmete, but nearly a century ago the great family of
Hatton (being much reduced by the passage of the Reform Bill and their
private misfortunes) commenced cotton-spinning here, and their mills,
constantly increasing in size and importance, gave to the Saxon Elmete
the name of Hatton-in-Elmete.

The little village had become a town of some importance, but nearly
every household in it was connected in some way or other with the
cotton mills, either as cotton masters or cotton operatives. There were
necessarily a few professional men and shopkeepers, but there was street
after street full of cotton mills, and the ancient manor of the lords of
Hatton had become thoroughly a manufacturing locality.

But Hatton-in-Elmete was in a beautiful locality, lying on a ridge of
hills rising precipitously from the river, and these hills surrounded
the town as with walls and appeared to block up the way into the world
beyond. The principal street lay along their base, and John Hatton rode
up it at the close of the long summer day, when the mills were shut and
the operatives gathered in groups about its places of interest. Every
woman smiled at him, every man touched his cap, but a stranger would
have noticed that not one man bared his head. Yorkshire men do not offer
that courtesy to any man, for its neglect (originally the expression of
strong individuality and self-respect) had become a habit as natural and
spontaneous as their manner or their speech.

About a mile beyond the town, on the summit of a hill, stood Hatton
Hall, and John felt a hurrying sense of home as soon as he caught a
glimpse of its early sixteenth-century towers and chimneys. The road to
it was all uphill, but it was flagged with immense blocks of stone and
shaded by great elm-trees; at the summit a high, old-fashioned iron gate
admitted him into a delightful garden. And in this sweet place there
stood one of the most ancient and picturesque homes of England.

It is here to be noticed that in the early centuries of the English
nation the homes of the nobles distinctly represented local feeling and
physical conditions. In the North they generally stood on hillsides