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    No Place Like Home
    No Place Like Home
    No Place Like Home
    Ebook58 pages56 minutes

    No Place Like Home

    By Hesba Stretton

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    About this ebook

    Hesba Stretton was the pen name of Sarah Smith (27 July 1832 – 8 October 1911), an English writer of children's books. She concocted the name from the initials of herself and four surviving siblings and part of the name of a Shropshire village she visited, All Stretton, where her sister Anne owned a house, Caradoc Lodge (font:Wikipedia)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHesba Stretton
    Release dateDec 8, 2015
    ISBN9788892527331
    No Place Like Home

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      Book preview

      No Place Like Home - Hesba Stretton

      No Place Like Home

      Hesba Stretton

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1 - An Old Hovel

      Chapter 2 - In the Woods

      Chapter 3 - Saturday and Sunday

      Chapter 4 - The Magistrate’s Meeting

      Chapter 5 - Turned Adrift

      Chapter 6 - Five Years

      Chapter 7 - Her Last Command

      Chapter 8 - Going Home

      Chapter 9 - A New Home

      Chapter 1

      An Old Hovel

      There was not another home like it in all the parish of Broadmoor. It was a half-ruined hut, with walls bulging outwards, and a ragged roof of old thatch, overgrown with moss and yellow stonecrop. A rusty iron pipe in one corner served as a chimney to the flat hearth, which was the only fireplace within; and a very small lattice-window of greenish glass, with a bull’s-eye in each pane, let in but little of the summer sunshine, and hardly a gleam of the winter’s gloomy light. Only a few yards off, the hut could not be distinguished from the ruins of an old lime-kiln, near which it had been built to shelter the lime-burners during their intervals of work. There was but one room downstairs, with an earthen floor trodden hard by the trampling of heavy feet, whilst under the thatch there was a little loft, reached by a steep ladder and a square hole in the ceiling, where the roof came down on each side to the rough flooring, and nowhere was there height enough for even a short person to stand upright.

      The furniture was as rude and simple as the home itself. The good household chattels, on which Ruth Medway had prided herself when she lived in her pretty cottage in the village street, had never come to this poor hovel. There was a broken chair or two, a table-top propped upon an unbarked trunk of a young fir-tree from the woods behind the lime-kiln, a little cracked crockery, two or three old boxes, and the indispensable saucepan and kettle in which she did all her cooking. Upstairs was a low pallet bedstead with a flock bed, and, on the floor beside it, a mattress stuffed with chaff, close under the roof, where the thatch must almost have touched the sleeper’s face. There was no window into this loft; the only light came through the square hole in the floor.

      ‘Home is home, be it never so homely;’ and Ruth Medway had learned to love the quiet place where her youngest and her dearest child had been born. Behind the house lay the Lime-kiln Woods; once a busy place of quarries and kilns, but left long ago to the growth of trees and brushwood; the haunt of all kinds of wild woodland creatures, hollow with rabbit-burrows, and thickly peopled with singing birds, and with the game that the squire loved to preserve. Excepting in the shooting season, when the sharp crack of guns was to be heard all day long, there was no noise to drown the buzz of the humble-bee, and the low whirring of the unseen grasshopper, and the hundred faint and delicate sounds which fill the stillness of an unfrequented greenwood. Day and night, summer and winter, had their special signs and sounds there, all well known to Ishmael, the youngest son of old Humphrey Medway.

      He was the youngest son, and the most unwelcome to his father. Humphrey had given but a scanty welcome to his first-born child, and each successor had been received with growing surliness. Ishmael came the last, when his mother’s hair was already grey, and her back bent with hard toil at out-door labour. The eldest son was grown up and married, and the little love he might have once felt for his mother had hardened into indifference, whilst the other children, those who were living, were scattered abroad, seldom caring to return home. Humphrey never mentioned any of them; but sometimes of an evening, when Ruth rested for a little while, and sat watching the kettle boil on the crackling fire of sticks, she would count their names over on her fingers; eight names over which she sighed, but at the ninth her brown wrinkled face wore a fleeting smile as she muttered, ‘Ishmael.’

      On the whole, Ruth was not given to brooding over the past; for she lived too hard a life to keep her memory green. She had grown fond of this lonely hut, where Ishmael had been born; and he had never known any other home. There was nothing in it to prevent him keeping pet dormice, and hedgehogs found in the hollows of the wood; though the gamekeeper would not

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