Bleak and wind-swept is the little town of Kirkby-Malhouse, and harsh and forbidding are the fells upon with it stands. It stretches in a single line of gray-stone, slate-roofed houses, dotted down the furze-clad slope of the long rolling moor. To the north and south stretch the swelling curves of the Yorkshire uplands, peeping over each other's backs to the skyland, with a tinge of yellow in the foreground, which shades away to olive in the distance, save where the long gray scars of rock protrude through the scanty and barren soil. From the little barren knoll above the church one may see to the westward a fringe of gold upon an arc of silver, where the great Morecambe sands are washed by the Irish Sea. To the east, Ingleborough looms purple in the distance; while Pennigent shoots up the tapering peak, whose great shadow, like Nature's own sun-dial, sweeps slowly around over a vast expanse of savage and sterile country.

In this lonely and secluded village I, James Upperton, found myself in the summer of '85. Little as the hamlet had to offer, it contained that for which I yearned above all things - seclusion and freedom from all which might distract my mind from the high and weighty subjects which engaged it. I was weary of the long turmoil and profitless strivings of life. From early youth my days had been spent in wild adventure and strange experiences, until at the age of thirty-nine there were few lands upon which I had not set foot, and scarcely any joy or sorrow of which I had not tasted. Among the first of Europeans, I had penetrated to the desolate shores of Lake Tanganyika; I had twice made my way to those unvisited and impenetrable jungles which skirt the great table-land of Roraima. As a soldier of fortune I had served under many flags. I was with Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley; and I fought with Chanzy in the army of the Loire. It may well seem strange that, after a life so exciting, I could give myself up to the dull routine and trivial interests of the West Riding hamlet. And yet there are excitements of the mind to which mere bodily peril or the exaltation of travel is mean and commonplace. For years I had devoted myself to the study of the mystic and hermetic philosophies, Egyptian, Indian, Grecian and medieval, until out of the vast chaos there had dimly dawned upon me a huge symmetrical design; and I seemed to grasp the key of that symbolism which was used by those learned men to screen there precious knowledge from the vulgar and the wicked. Gnostics and Neo-platonists, Chaldeans, Rosicrucians, and Indian Mystics, I saw and understood in which each played a part. To me the jargon of Paracelsus, the mysteries of the alchemists, and the visions of Swedenborg were all pregnant with meaning. I had deciphered the mysterious inscriptions of El Biram; and I knew the import of those strange characters which have been engraved by an unknown race upon the cliffs of Southern Turkestan. Immersed in these great and engrossing studies, I asked nothing from life save a garret for myself and for my books, where I might pursue my studies without interference or interruption.

But even in this little moorside village I found that it was impossible to shake off the censorship of one's fellow-mortals. When I went forth, the rustics would eye me askance, and mothers would ship up their children as I passed down the village street. At night I have glanced through my diamond-paned lattice to find that a group of foolish, staring peasants had been craning their necks in an ecstasy of fear and curiosity to watch me at my solitary task. My landlady, too, became garrulous with a clatter of questions under every small pretext, and a hundred small ruses and wiles by which to tempt me to speak to her of myself and of my plans. All this was ill to bear; but when at last I heard that I was no longer to be sole lodger, and that a lady, a stranger, had engaged the other room, I felt that indeed it was time for one who sought the quiet and the peace of study to seek more tranquil surrounding.

In my frequent walks I had learned to know well the wild and desolate region where Yorkshire borders on both Lancashire and Westmoreland. From Kirkby-Malhouse I had frequently made my way to this lonesome wilderness, and had traversed it from end to end. In the gloomy majesty of its scenery, and the appalling stillness and loneliness of its rock-strewn, melancholy solitudes, it seemed to offer me a secure asylum from espionage and criticism. As it chanced, I had in my rambles come upon an isolated dwelling in the very heart of these lonely moors, which I at once determined should be my own. It was a two-roomed cottage, which had once belonged to some shepherd, but which had long been deserted, and was crumbling rapidly to ruin. In the winter floods, the Gaster Beck, which runs down Gaster Fell, where the little shieling stood, had overswept its bank and torn away a portion of the wall. The roof, too, was in ill cases, and the scattered slates lay thick amongst the grass. Yet the main shell of the house stood firm and true; and it was no great task for me to have all that was amiss set right. Though not rich, I could yet afford to carry out so modest a whim in a lordly way. There came slaters and masons from Kirby-Malhouse, and soon the lonely cottage upon Gaster Fell was as strong and weather-tight as ever.

The two rooms I laid out in a wild different manner - my own tastes are of a Spartan turn, and the outer chamber was so planned as to accord with them. An oil-stove by Rippingille of Birmingham furnished me with the means of cooking; while two great bags, the one of flour, and the other of potatoes, made me independent of all supplies from without. In diet I had long been a Pythagorean, so that the scraggy long-limbed sheep which browsed upon the wiry grass by the Gaster Beck had little to fear from their new campanion. A nine-gallon cask of oil served me as a sideboard; while a square table, a deal chair, and a truckle-bed completed the list of my domestic fittings. At the head of my couch hung two unpainted shelves - the lower for my dishes and cooking utensils, the upper for the few portraits which took me back to the little that was pleasant in the long, wearisome toiling for wealth and for pleasure which had marked the life I had left behind.

If this dwelling-room of mine were plain even to squalor, its poverty was more than atoned for by the luxury of the chamber which was destined to best for the mind to be surrounded by such objects as would be in harmony with the studies which occupied it, and that the loftiest and most ethereal conditions of thought are only possible amid surroundings which please the eye and gratify the senses. The room which I had set apart for my mystic studies was set forth in a style as gloomy and majestic as the thoughts and aspirations with which it was to harmonize. Both walls and ceilings were covered with a paper of the richest and glossiest black, on which was traced a lurid and arabesque pattern of dead gold. A black velvet curtain covered the single diamond-paned window; while a thick, yielding carpet of the same material prevented the sound of my own footfalls, as I paced backward and forward, from breaking the current of my thoughts. Along the cornices ran gold rods, from which depended six pictures, all of the somber and imaginative castle, which chimed best with my fancy. Two, as I remember, were from the brush of Fuseli; one from Noel Paton; one from Gustave Dore; two from Martin; with a little water-color by the incomparable Blake. From the center of the ceiling hung a single gold thread, so thin as to be scarce visible, but of great toughness. From this swung a dove of the same metal, with wings out-stretched. The bird was hollow, and contained perfumed oil; while a syph-like figure, curiously fashioned from pink crystal, hovered over the lamp, and imparted a soft and rich glow to the light. A brazen fireplace backed with malachite, two tiger skins upon the carpet, a buhl table, and two reclining chairs in amber plush and ebony, completed the furniture of my bijou study, save only that under the window stretched the long book-shelves, which contained the choicest works of those who have busied themselves with mystery of life.

Boehme, Swedenborg, Damton, Berto, Lacci, Sinnett, Hardinge, Britten, Dunlop, Amberley, Winwood Read, Des Mousseaux, Alan Kardec, Lepsius, Sepher, Toldo, and the Abbe Dubois - these were some of those who stood marshaled between my oaken shelves. When the lamp was lighted of a night and the lurid, flickering light played over the somber and bizarre surroundings, the effect was all that I could wish. Nor was it lessened by the howling of the wind as it swept over the melancholy waste around me. Here, at last, I thought is a black-eddy in life's hurried stream, where I may lie in peace, forgetting and forgotten.

And yet it was destined that ere ever I reached this quiet harbor I should learn that I was still one of humankind, and that it was an ill thing to strive to break the bond which binds us to our fellows. It was but two nights before the date I had fixed upon for my change of dwelling, when I was conscious of a bustle in the house beneath, with the bearing of heavy burdens up the creaking stair, and the harsh voice of my landlady, loud in welcome and protestations of joy. From time to time, amid her whirl of words, I could hear a gentle and softly modulated voice, which struck pleasantly upon my ear after the long weeks during which I had listened only to the rude dialect of the dalesmen. For an hour I could hear the dialogue beneath - the high voice and the low, with clatter of cup and clink of study door, and I knew that my new fellow-lodger had sought her room. Already my fears had been fulfilled, and my studies the worse for her coming. I vowed in my mind that the second sunset should find me installed, safe from all such petty influences, in my sanctuary at Gaster Fell.

On the morning after this incident I was up betimes, as is my wont; but I was surprised, on glancing from my window, to see that our new inmate was earlier still. She was walking down the narrow pathway which zigzags over the fell - a tall woman, slender, her head sunk upon her breast, her arms filled with a bristle of wild flowers, with she had gathered in her morning rambles. The white and pink of her dress, and the touch of deep red ribbon in her broad dropping hat, formed a pleasant dash of color against the dun-tinted landscape. She was some distance off when I first set eyes upon her, yet I knew that this wandering woman could be none other than our arrival of last night, for there was a grace and refinement in her bearing which marked her from the dwellers of the fells. Even as I watched, she passed swiftly and lightly down the pathway, and turning through the wicket gate, at the further end of our cottage garden, she seated herself upon the green bank which faced my window, and strewing her flowers in front of her, set herself to arrange them.

As she sat there, with the rising sun at her back, and the glow of the morning spreading like an aureole around her stately and well-poised head, I could see that she was a woman of extraordinary personal beauty. Her face was Spanish rather than English in its type - oval, olive, with black sparkling eyes, and a sweetly sensitive mouth. From under the broad straw hat two thick coils of the blue-black hair curved down on either side of her graceful queenly neck. I was surprised, as I watched her, to see that her shoes and skirt bore witness to a journey rather than to a mere morning ramble. Her light dress was stained, wet, and bedraggled; while her boots were thick with the yellow soil of the fells. Her face, too, wore a weary expression, and her young beauty seemed to be clouded over by the shadow of inward trouble. Even as I watched her, she burst suddenly into wild weeping, and throwing down her bundle of flowers, ran swiftly into the house.

Distrait as I was, and weary of the ways of the world, I was conscious of a sudden pang of sympathy and grief as I looked upon the spasm of despair which seemed to convulse this strange and beautiful women. I bent to my books, and yet my thoughts would ever turn to her proud, clear-cut face, her weather-stained dress, her drooping head, and the sorrow which lay in each line and feature of her pensive face. Again and again I found myself standing at my casement, and glancing out to see if there were signs of her return. There on the green bank was the litter of golden gorse and purple marsh-mallow where she had left them; but through the whole morning I neither saw nor heard anything from her who had so suddenly aroused my curiosity and stirred my long-slumbering emotions.

Mrs. Adams, my landlady, was wont to carry up my frugal breakfast; yet it was very rarely that I allowed her to break the current of my thoughts, or to draw my mind by her idle chatter from weightier things. This morning, however, for once she found me in a listening mood, and with little prompting, proceeded to pour into my ears all that she knew of our beautiful visitor.

"Miss Eva Cameron be her name, sir," she said; "but who she be, or where she come fra, I know little more than yoursel'. Maybe it was the same reason that brought her to Kirkby-Malhouse as fetched you there yoursel', sir."

"Possibly," said I, ignoring the covert question; "but I should hardly have thought that Kirkby-Mal-house was a place which offered any great attractions to a young lady."

"It's a gay place when the fair is on," said Mrs. Adams; "yet maybe it's just health and rest as the young lady is seeking."

"Very likely," said I, stirring my coffee; "and no doubt some friend of yours has advised her to seek them in your very comfortable apartments."

"Heh, sir!" she cried, "there's the wonder of it. The leddy has just come fra France; and how her folk came to learn of me is just a wonder. A week ago, up comes a man to my door - a fine man, sir, and a gentleman, as one could see with half an eye.

'You are Mrs. Adams," says he. 'I engage your rooms for Miss Cameron,' says he. 'She will be here in a week,' says he; and then off without a word of terms. Last night there comes the young leddy hersel' - soft-spoken and downcast, with a touch of the French in her speech. But my sakes, sir! I must away and mak' her some tea, for she'll feel lonesome-like, poor lamb, when she wakes under a strange roof."