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They soon reached their destination, a small, white, many-gabled old-fashioned windowed house, with bright flowers in boxes attached to the window-sill. Father Lefroy was full of hospitality and welcomed Captain Trevalyon, telling him he was ready to tell him of Madame Rose and her movements for the past three years.

Her nature was the counterpart of the hill-side grove, where as a child she had read her fairy tales, and now as a woman turned the first pages of a more wondrous legend still. Lifted above the many-gabled roof, yet not cut off from the echo of human speech, the little grove seemed a green sanctuary, fringed about with violets, and full of summer melody and bloom.

A smooth grassy eminence, richly studded with park-like clumps of trees, slopes up from the water's very edge to Hurstley Hall; yonder goodly, if not grand, Elizabethan structure, full of mullioned windows, carved oak panels, stone-cut coats of arms, pinnacles, and traceries, and lozenges, and drops; and all this glory crowned by a many-gabled, high-peaked roof.

The woods were of oak in spring foliage, and against that vivid green I saw the many-gabled tiled roofs and tall chimneys of the old timbered houses, glowing red and warm brown in the brilliant sunshine a scene of rare beauty, and yet it produced no shock of pleasure; never, in fact, had I looked on a lovely scene for the first time so unemotionally.

I will describe this old-world abode, not as I first saw it, for when I first visited my aunts Amelia and Deborah, I was only one year old, but as I first remember it a house with the glamour of a many-gabled roof and diamond window-panes.

Once, and not so many years before, the Bay Road was contemptuously referred to as "Poverty Lane" and dwellers along its winding, weed-grown track vied with one another in shiftless shabbiness. But now all shabbiness had disappeared and many-gabled "cottages" proudly stood where the shanties of the Poverty Laners once humbly leaned. Albert had known Jane Kelsey for some time.

Leaving the towers of Oxford behind them, keeping the ancient Roman highway, passing by the low, strong, many-gabled farmhouses, with rustic beauties smiling at the windows and wiser fathers scowling at the doors, on they ride. To the Royalists, these troopers are "Prince Robert and the hope of the nation"; to the Puritans, they are only "Prince Robber and his company of rake-shames."

I fancied, too, an intelligence and keenness in some of the Yorkshire physiognomies, akin to those characteristics in my countrymen's faces. We passed an ancient, many-gabled inn, large, low, and comfortable, bearing the name of the Devonshire House, as does our own hotel, for the Duke of Devonshire is a great proprietor in these parts.

Here, at last, between the ranks of the many-gabled heights, Big Minóok Creek meets Father Yukon. Just below the junction, perched jauntily on a long terrace, up above the frozen riverbed, high and dry, and out of the coming trouble when river and creek should wake here was the long, log-built mining town, Minóok, or Rampart, for the name was still undetermined in the spring of 1898.

As Brandon looked upon it it rose before him amidst the groves of six hundred years, its many-gabled roof rising out from amidst a sea of foliage, speaking of wealth, luxury, splendor, power, influence, and all that men hope for, or struggle for, or fight for; from all of which he and his had been cast out; and the one who had done this was even now occupying the old ancestral seat of his family.