old chair,
but in vain; for her timid bidding, faltered from behind a crowd, failed
to catch the ear of the jocular auctioneer, (who, in Wales, must always
be somewhat of a mountebank,) and the favourite chair was gone at once,
after the wheel, and the many old familiar chattels which she saw
standing, now the property of strangers.

Events crowded fast on each other, hurrying on that terrible hour in
which a revolting act of self-devotion was to render even this domestic
horror of little injury to her parents. "I will buy 'daddy' a better
chair, or he shall have enough to buy a better, when I am gone," she
murmured to herself. For now the rumour grew rife, that Mr Fitzarthur
had actually landed, was daily expected; and, in confirmation, she
received through a neighbour present, a letter left for her by her
father, stating that he had now actually received, under the Nabob's own
hand, a proposal of marriage, which the generous old man (who well knew
her engagements to another) solemnly charged her to reject, at all
hazards to himself. He further begged her to come quickly to the
temporary place of refuge he and her mother had found under the roof of
a hill cottage, just now tenantless through the death of a relative.
Thither, with heavy heart, Winifred hastened by the first light of
morning.

"_The_ hill," an expression much in the mouths of Welsh rural people,
signifies not any particular one, as it would in England, but the whole
desolate regions of the mountain heights; the homeless place of
ever-whistling winds, and low bellowing clouds, mingling with the mist
of the mountain, into one black smoke-like rolling volume--the place of
dismal pools and screaming kites, full of bogs, concealed by a sickly
yellowish herbage in the midst of the russet waste, boundlessly wearying
the eye with its sober monotony of tint. If a pool or lake relieve it by
reflecting the sky, on approach it is found choked all round by high
rushes, and shadowed by low strangely-shaped rocks, tinted by mosses of
dingy hue; the water that glistened pleasantly in the distance, shrinks
now to a mere pond, (the middle space, too deep for bullrushes and other
weeds to take root.) The deep stillness, or the unintermitted hollow
blowing of the wind (according to the weather) are equally mournful.
The rotten soil is cleft and torn into gulleys and small channels, in
which the mahogany-coloured rivulets, springing from the peat morass,
straggle silently