The Adventures of Harry Richmond Book 1

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - One midnight of a winter month the sleepers in Riversley Grange were awakened by a ringing of the outer bell and blows upon the great hall-doors. Squire Beltham was master there: the other members of the household were his daughter Dorothy Beltham; a married daughter Mrs. Richmond; Benjamin Sewis an old half-caste butler; various domestic servants; and a little boy christened Harry Lepel Richmond the squire's grandson. Riversley Grange lay in a rich watered hollow of the Hampshire heath-country; a lonely circle of enclosed brook and pasture within view of some of its dependent farms but out of hail of them or any dwelling except the stables and the head-gardener's cottage. Traditions of audacious highway-men together with the gloomy surrounding fir-scenery kept it alive to fears of solitude and the night; and there was that in the determined violence of the knocks and repeated bell-peals which assured all those who had ever listened in the servants' hall to prognostications of a possible night attack that the robbers had come at last most awfully.