sand and seaweed for his land.

One of the farms on the cliff had lately been taken by Sylvia's
father. He was a man who had roamed about a good deal--been sailor,
smuggler, horse-dealer, and farmer in turns; a sort of fellow
possessed by a spirit of adventure and love of change, which did him
and his own family more harm than anybody else. He was just the kind
of man that all his neighbours found fault with, and all his
neighbours liked. Late in life (for such an imprudent man as he, was
one of a class who generally wed, trusting to chance and luck for
the provision for a family), farmer Robson married a woman whose
only want of practical wisdom consisted in taking him for a husband.
She was Philip Hepburn's aunt, and had had the charge of him until
she married from her widowed brother's house. He it was who had let
her know when Haytersbank Farm had been to let; esteeming it a
likely piece of land for his uncle to settle down upon, after a
somewhat unprosperous career of horse-dealing. The farmhouse lay in
the shelter of a very slight green hollow scarcely scooped out of
the pasture field by which it was surrounded; the short crisp turf
came creeping up to the very door and windows, without any attempt
at a yard or garden, or any nearer enclosure of the buildings than
the stone dyke that formed the boundary of the field itself. The
buildings were long and low, in order to avoid the rough violence of
the winds that swept over that wild, bleak spot, both in winter and
summer. It was well for the inhabitants of that house that coal was
extremely cheap; otherwise a southerner might have imagined that
they could never have survived the cutting of the bitter gales that
piped all round, and seemed to seek out every crevice for admission
into the house.

But the interior was warm enough when once you had mounted the long
bleak lane, full of round rough stones, enough to lame any horse
unaccustomed to such roads, and had crossed the field by the little
dry, hard footpath, which tacked about so as to keep from directly
facing the prevailing wind. Mrs. Robson was a Cumberland woman, and
as such, was a cleaner housewife than the farmers' wives of that
north-eastern coast, and was often shocked at their ways, showing it
more by her looks than by her words, for she was not a great talker.
This fastidiousness in such matters made her own house extremely
comfortable, but did not tend to render her popular among her
neighbours. In