It was a wild wet afternoon in the eighteen-nineties. The West Riding of Yorkshire lay harried beneath an Atlantic gale, which, however, it received not prostrate but battling, defiant. The hills of dark millstone grit, rising and falling in rhythmic succession like the surge and die of notes in some vast symphony, seemed now, as their slopes grew grey in the twilight, to link arms in a harsh chord, and stand staunch and stolid against the raging wind which howled across their massive heads, felted with tough-stemmed heather and rough grass, and shrieked savagely down the narrow intertwining valleys to their populous bases. The chains of small yellowish lights which wound about their lower folds, or, greatly daring, sparsely assailed their summits, seemed to sway and rock beneath the storm; grew dim behind the sudden sheets of icy rain, but were not extinguished. The long heavy clouds which drove powerfully across the darkening sky were matched by the tattered but flying plumes which streamed beneath them; for from the mills which forested the lower slopes, hundreds of tall slender chimneys were vigorously tossing their thick black smoke into the air.
