Roots [antikvár]

CHAPTER I The Whitelaws of Fellow's Top, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, were a family whicli could only have been bred in that land of broad acres and narrow prejudices. They believed, and probably had held the belief for three hundred years, that although other counties might produce men of worth and ability, such men were exceptions. They believed that Yorkshire held a sort of divine right which made her men finer, more able, and more successful than those of any other portion of England. If you had narrowed down this belief, if you had accepted the assumption that Yorkshire was indeed a mental and geographical paradise, and had asked which part of that delectable county was the most favoured by Heaven, they would have admitted, or at least inferred, that Fellow's Top was the place. The Whitelaws had held Fellow's Top since 1689, when the first mention of the name occurs in the registers of the Parish of Brockingly. The farm then consisted of twenty-five acres, and was bounded on the north by Fellow's End and on the south by Bassets. In 1764, Charles Whitelaw added fifty-three acres of land which he bought from Lord Clarsdale; they lay to the east of his own holding. The Clarsdales were gamblers, and during the next fifty years the Whitelaws continued to add acres to Fellow's Top—acres sold to them by the spendthrift Clarsdales. In I860, Rudolph Whitelaw—and it was a perpetual mystery how the name Rudolph had ever crept into the family—still lived in the low greystone farmhouse which dated back to 1689, When he died, a year later, his son Martin built the new farmhouse, also in stone, 11