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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. AT THE GATE OF THE WINDS. It begins with "Windy Knoll" and ends with "The Travellers' Eest." Windy Knoll is the crown of the Win- natts Pass, overlooking as wild a region as you may find in England. At the date of this history, only a few years ago, " The Travellers' Eest" was anything but the haven its title would suggest. Amidst the storm and stress of Windy Knoll, God dwelt with His wonders of cloud and sky. At the foot of the Pass, within the walls of his misnamed hostelry, lived Scarthin Blythe, a libel on the original man whom God made in His own image. The simple people of the Peak still call the craggy gorge between Buxton and Castleton " the Gate of the Winds," as it was named of old by their predecessors, who endowed the country with such landmarks as " God's City," " Millstone Nick," "The Toad's Mouth," "The Devil's Hole," " Odin's Mine," " Dead Man's Clough," and " Hope Dale." The poet who said that " seas are the fields of combat of the four winds" had never faced the land-storms of the New World nor ridden through the northern passes of the Old. It was no wind of the sea that blew through the rocky gates as Jessop Blythe fought his way to his brother's abode on the night of his banishment from God's factory, and the cruel abandonment of his wife and child. It started forth as do the rivers of the Peak from subterranean depths, from unexplored caves and bottomless waterways. It was a local wind, that was content to storm the hills of Castle- ton and tear up and down the mile of ragged cleft that gives at last upon the Vale of Hope sentinelled by Mam Tor, and watched over by Win Hill, that had borne the shock of storm and tempest from the day of their first upheaval. From this Gate of the Winds you enter a vast amphitheatre of stone-walled m.
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