o comfort
mother, by making her to work for us. I, John Ridd, was the eldest,
and felt it a heavy thing on me; next came sister Annie, with about two
years between us; and then the little Eliza.

Now, before I got home and found my sad loss--and no boy ever loved his
father more than I loved mine--mother had done a most wondrous thing,
which made all the neighbours say that she must be mad, at least. Upon
the Monday morning, while her husband lay unburied, she cast a white
hood over her hair, and gathered a black cloak round her, and, taking
counsel of no one, set off on foot for the Doone-gate.

In the early afternoon she came to the hollow and barren entrance, where
in truth there was no gate, only darkness to go through. If I get on
with this story, I shall have to tell of it by-and-by, as I saw it
afterwards; and will not dwell there now. Enough that no gun was fired
at her, only her eyes were covered over, and somebody led her by the
hand, without any wish to hurt her.

A very rough and headstrong road was all that she remembered, for she
could not think as she wished to do, with the cold iron pushed against
her. At the end of this road they delivered her eyes, and she could
scarce believe them.

For she stood at the head of a deep green valley, carved from out the
mountains in a perfect oval, with a fence of sheer rock standing round
it, eighty feet or a hundred high; from whose brink black wooded hills
swept up to the sky-line. By her side a little river glided out from
underground with a soft dark babble, unawares of daylight; then growing
brighter, lapsed away, and fell into the valley. Then, as it ran down
the meadow, alders stood on either marge, and grass was blading out
upon it, and yellow tufts of rushes gathered, looking at the hurry. But
further down, on either bank, were covered houses built of stone, square
and roughly cornered, set as if the brook were meant to be the street
between them. Only one room high they were, and not placed opposite each
other, but in and out as skittles are; only that the first of all, which
proved to be the captain's, was a sort of double house, or rather two
houses joined together by a plank-bridge, over the river.

Fourteen cots my mother counted, all very much of a pattern, and nothing
to choose between them, unless it were the captain's. Deep in the quiet
valley there, away from noise, and violence, and brawl, save that of
the rivulet, any man would have deemed the