Demos | Page 4

stream, a tributary of the Severn. Wanley consists in the
main of one long street; the houses are stone-built, with mullioned
windows, here and there showing a picturesque gable or a quaint old
chimney. The oldest buildings are four cottages which stand at the end
of the street; once upon a time they formed the country residence of the

abbots of Belwick. The abbey of that name still claims for its ruined
self a portion of earth's surface; but, as it had the misfortune to be
erected above the thickest coal-seam in England, its walls are
blackened with the fume of collieries and shaken by the strain of
mighty engines. Climb Stanbury Hill at nightfall, and, looking eastward,
you behold far off a dusky ruddiness in the sky, like the last of an angry
sunset; with a glass you can catch glimpses of little tongues of flame,
leaping and quivering on the horizon. That is Belwick. The good abbots,
who were wont to come out in the summer time to Wanley, would be at
a loss to recognise their consecrated home in those sooty relics.
Belwick, with its hundred and fifty fire-vomiting blast-furnaces, would
to their eyes more nearly resemble a certain igneous realm of which
they thought much in their sojourn upon earth, and which, we may
assure ourselves, they dream not of in the quietness of their last long
sleep.
A large house, which stands aloof from the village and a little above it,
is Wanley Manor. The county history tells us that Wanley was given in
the fifteenth century to that same religious foundation, and that at the
dissolution of monasteries the Manor passed into the hands of Queen
Catherine. The house is half-timbered; from the height above it looks
old and peaceful amid its immemorial trees. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century it became the home of a family named Eldon, the
estate including the greater part of the valley below. But an Eldon who
came into possession when William IV. was King brought the fortunes
of his house to a low ebb, and his son, seeking to improve matters by
abandoning his prejudices and entering upon commercial speculation,
in the end left a widow and two boys with little more to live upon than
the income which arose from Mrs. Eldon's settlements. The Manor was
shortly after this purchased by a Mr. Mutimer, a Belwick ironmaster;
but Mrs. Eldon and her boys still inhabited the house, in consequence
of certain events which will shortly be narrated. Wanley would have
mourned their departure; they were the aristocracy of the
neighbourhood, and to have them ousted by a name which no one knew,
a name connected only with blast-furnaces, would have made a distinct
fall in the tone of Wanley society. Fortunately no changes were made in
the structure by its new owner. Not far from it you see the church and
the vicarage, these also unmolested in their quiet age. Wanley, it is to

be feared, lags far behind the times--painfully so, when one knows for a
certainty that the valley upon which it looks conceals treasures of coal,
of ironstone--blackband, to be technical--and of fireclay. Some ten
years ago it seemed as if better things were in store; there was a chance
that the vale might for ever cast off its foolish greenery, and begin
vomiting smoke and flames in humble imitation of its metropolis
beyond the hills. There are men in Belwick who have an angry feeling
whenever Wanley is mentioned to them.
After the inhabitants of the Manor, the most respected of those who
dwelt in Wanley were the Walthams. At the time of which I speak, this
family consisted of a middle-aged lady; her son, of one-and-twenty;
and her daughter, just eighteen. They had resided here for little more
than two years, but a gentility which marked their speech and
demeanour, and the fact that they were well acquainted with the Eldons,
from the first caused them to be looked up to. It was conjectured, and
soon confirmed by Mrs. Waltham's own admissions, that they had
known a larger way of living than that to which they adapted
themselves in the little house on the side of Stanbury Hill, whence they
looked over the village street. Mr. Waltham had, in fact, been a junior
partner in a Belwick firm, which came to grief. He saved enough out of
the wreck to: make a modest competency for his family, and would
doubtless in time have retrieved his fortune, but death was beforehand
with him. His wife, in the second year of her widowhood, came with
her daughter Adela to Wanley; her son Alfred had gone to commercial
work in Belwick. Mrs. Waltham was a prudent woman, and tenacious
of ideas which recommended themselves to