The story was for many a year, and we believe still
is, told round many a cottage hearth, and though it
appeals to what many would term superstition, it yet
sounded, in the ears of a rude and simple audience,
a thrilling, and let us hope, not altogether fruitless
homily.
About thirty years ago I was selected by two rich
old maids to visit a property in that part of Lancashire
which lies near the famous forest of Pendle, with
which Mr. Ainsworth’s “Lancashire Witches”
has made us so pleasantly familiar. My business
was to make partition of a small property, including
a house and demesne, to which they had a long time
before succeeded as co-heiresses.
The last forty miles of my journey I was obliged to
post, chiefly by cross-roads, little known, and less
frequented, and presenting scenery often extremely
interesting and pretty. The picturesqueness of
the landscape was enhanced by the season, the beginning
of September, at which I was travelling.
I had never been in this part of the world before;
I am told it is now a great deal less wild, and, consequently,
less beautiful.
At the inn where I had stopped for a relay of horses
and some dinner—for it was then past five
o’clock—I found the host, a hale
old fellow of five-and-sixty, as he told me, a man
of easy and garrulous benevolence, willing to accommodate
his guests with any amount of talk, which the slightest
tap sufficed to set flowing, on any subject you pleased.
I was curious to learn something about Barwyke, which
was the name of the demesne and house I was going
to. As there was no inn within some miles of
it, I had written to the steward to put me up there,
the best way he could, for a night.
The host of the “Three Nuns,” which was
the sign under which he entertained wayfarers, had
not a great deal to tell. It was twenty years,
or more, since old Squire Bowes died, and no one had
lived in the Hall ever since, except the gardener
and his wife.
“Tom Wyndsour will be as old a man as myself;
but he’s a bit taller, and not so much in flesh,
quite,” said the fat innkeeper.
“But there were stories about the house,”
I repeated, “that they said, prevented tenants
from coming into it?”
“Old wives’ tales; many years ago, that
will be, sir; I forget ’em; I forget ’em
all. Oh yes, there always will be, when a house
is left so; foolish folk will always be talkin’;
but I hadn’t heard a word about it this twenty
year.”
It was vain trying to pump him; the old landlord of
the “Three Nuns,” for some reason, did
not choose to tell tales of Barwyke Hall, if he really
did, as I suspected, remember them.
I paid my reckoning, and resumed my journey, well
pleased with the good cheer of that old-world inn,
but a little disappointed.
We had been driving for more than an hour, when we
began to cross a wild common; and I knew that, this
passed, a quarter of an hour would bring me to the
door of Barwyke Hall.
