Spellbound Author:Alice King This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1874 Excerpt: ... 211 CHAPTER VIII. Pendleton Hall is one of the small houses of the almost extinct race of yeomen-squires which has been absorbed into the ... more »families of the greater landed gentry, or drifted away into the great adventures of trade. Twenty-five years before the opening of our story, a cousin of Mr. Hindle of Harwood Cliff lived there as a yeoman, cultivating a farm which was his own small estate. "With this pursuit he united that of a woolstapler, and carried on a trade with Bradford in Wiltshire, whither he took some of the longer wools of the Pennine Chain and border, and whence, for certain purposes of the Yorkshiremanufactures, he brought the short, but fine, lambs'-wool of the Southdown sheep, fed on the chalk downs of Wiltshire and Hampshire. In his rambles in the South he was often the guest of a farmer at Chippenham, whose daughter had been brought up in the family of the neighbouring clergyman. She had been a companion of his only child--a child of fairylike beauty--so wonderfully seductive that it captivated the fancy of the Countess De la Legh, then on a visit to a family of rank in the neighbourhood. The clergyman was easily nattered by a lady of fashion and high rank to permit his child to become her guest; she carried-her off to London. There she lavished upon her everything that the most fanciful tenderness could suggest; for, having no daughter, she thus filled up that void in her affections. The girl was educated in every accomplishment with solicitude, and so became gradually an exile from her natural home, and the adopted daughter of the Countess De la Legh. Yet, from time to time, this fair creature appeared in her father's simple home, to astonish himself and her former companion, the farmer's daughter, with the development of form, feature...« less