settled down at Windy Gap.

That was the name of our cottage. It is a nice breezy name, isn't it?
though it does sound rather cold. And in some ways it _was_ cold, at
least it was windy, and quite suited its name, though at some seasons of
the year it was very calm and sheltered. Sheltered on two sides it
always was, for it stood in a sort of nest a little way up the
Middlemoor Hills, with high ground on the north and on the east, so that
the only winds really to be feared could never do us much harm. It was
more a nest than a 'gap,' for inside, it was so cosy, so very cosy,
even in winter. The walls were nice and thick, built of rather
gloomy-looking, rough gray stone, and the windows were deep--deep enough
to have window-seats in them, where granny and I used often to sit with
our books or work, as the inner part of the rooms, owing to the shape of
the windows, was rather dark, and the rooms of course were small.

We had a little drawing-room, which we always sat in, and a still
smaller dining-room, which was very nice, though in reality it was more
a kitchen than a dining-room. It had a neat kitchen range and an oven,
and some things had to be cooked there, though there was another little
kitchen across the passage where our servant Kezia did all the messy
work--peeling potatoes, and washing up, and all those sorts of things,
you know. The dining-room-kitchen was used as little as possible for
cooking, and grandmamma was so very, very neat and particular that it
was almost as pretty and cosy as the drawing-room.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms--a good-sized one for grandmamma, a
smaller one beside it for me, and a still smaller one with a rather
sloping roof for Kezia. The house is very easy to understand, you see,
for it was just three and three, three upstairs rooms over three
downstairs ones. But there was rather a nice little entrance hall, or
closed-in porch, and the passages were pretty wide. So it did not seem
at all a poky or stuffy house though it was so small. Indeed, one could
scarcely fancy a 'Windy Gap Cottage' anything but fresh and airy, could
one?

I was never tired of hearing the story of the day that grandmamma first
came to Middlemead to look for a house. She told it me so often that I
seem to know all about it just as if I had been with her, instead of
being a stupid, helpless little baby left behind with my nurse--Kezia
was my nurse then--while poor granny had to go travelling all about,