The Wildfire Club - The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive

OR THE LAST TENANT.
How many times these trite sentences were uttered in
the village of Rookwood, (a remote and old-fashioned sub.
urb to a large metropolitan town in the north of England,)
during the last century, we cannot correctly state; but we
have reason to believe that they tcrminated every debate,
held not less than six times a day upon an average, with
which the good people of Rookwood were wont to canvass
the life and times of Mrs. Hannah Morrison, the last tenant
of Rookwood Grange.
Few people knew much of the history of Rookwooi
Grange; fewer still had taken any particular interest in
thtl sayings and doings of its last inhabitant at the time
when she might fairly have laid claim to be the subject of
such interest; but now that she was old, very old indeed,
and worn and decrepit, and in all likelihood would soon
pass away from sight and memory altogether, a strangtl
and universal interest began to be manifested about the
little remnant of life which she yet had to spin out. It
was not that she had wealth to leave; poor, old Hannah!
she was the last and only dependant of a broken family,
who had died off one after the other in the descending
scale of prosperity, while the once stately manor house
had sunk into a ruin, the once high and noble owners of
the soil had become petty inhabitants, and the owl and the
bat had shared, with the last threadbare and ruined forms
of the house of Rookwood, the desolate hearth and
crumbling halls, which had mice been the pride of the
"bounty side. But the house was haunted, folks said; old
Hannah lh'ed there all alone; 'tis true Hhe had lived tkere
time out of mind; beyond, in fact, the memory of the farfamed"
oldest inhabitant;" but living there now, when
not a single creature beyond the aforesaid owls, babl, and
may be a very abstemious rat or two, such a one as could