A Wasted Crime Author:David Christie Murray Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER III- Eook's End, though it lay within two miles and a half of Hoggett's Green, had never fallen within measurable distance of the desolation which encompassed the neighboring vi... more »llage. There were outlying mines about it, and some of the handicrafts pursued within its limits dealt with iron in various forms, but all in a small way, and with little result in the way of smoke or noise. In a word, the population was half manufacturing and half rural. At almost any hour of the day or night the wayfarer might hear the clink of hammers as he passed the squalid cottages where the chain-makers and nail-makers lived and labored. But there were four or five farmhouses in the immediate neighborhood, and in places the raw, shaley refuse of a pit-mound would intrude from the edge of a cornfield. The farther you got away from Hoggett's Green, the fairer and the less disturbed by evidences of labor the landscape grew, until within the distance of four miles you might have fancied yourself in the very heart of rural England. The sky was always red at night-time, and when the wind blew from the region of smoke andflame, the brightest midsummer sky would be clouded by a haze of smoke; but, in the proper seasons, all the wayside flowers known in mid-England flourished luxuriantly, and the hedges were, as beautiful in their unrestrained growth as they were in the heart of Warwickshire itself. The school-mistress was not a young person who threatened in vain, and she had fulfilled her promise to her brother. She had removed her simple belongings, her dresses and her books, from his house at Hoggett's Green to a cottage at Rook's End. She had walked over on the Sunday to make her bargain with the proprietress of the cottage — a clean, withered old woman, and a notable housewife, who had known the school-mistress almo...« less