here she had gripped and to maintain what she had undertaken; and
even her life at Windy Brow did not shake her.

And that life might well have shaken both a stronger mind and even a
more resolute will than hers.

A square stone house of eight rooms, set on a bleak fell-side where the
sun never shone, where no fruits ripened, no flowers bloomed and no
trees grew, save here and there a dwarfed and twisted thorn covered with
pale gray lichen and bent by the wind into painful deformity of
growth--a house which had no garden, only a strip of rank, coarse grass
before the windows, with a potato-patch and kail-yard to the side; where
was no adornment within or without, no beauty of color, no softness of
line, merely a rugged, lonesome, square stone tent set up on a
mountain-spur, as it would seem for the express reception of tortured
penitents not seeking to soften sorrow,--this was Windy Brow, the
patrimony of the Gryces, where Keziah, Emmanuel's eldest sister, lived
and had lived these sixty years and more.

The house stood alone. Monk Grange, the hamlet to which it
geographically belonged--a place as bleak and bare as itself, and which
seemed to have been flung against the fell-foot as if a brick-layer's
hodman had pitched the hovels at haphazard anyhow--was two good miles
away, and the market-town, to be got at only by crossing a dangerous
moor, was nine miles off--as far as Sherrington from North Aston.

The few poor dwellers in Monk Grange had little to do with the
market-town. They lived mostly on what they managed to raise and rear
among themselves--holding braxy mutton good enough for feast-days, and
oatmeal porridge all the year round the finest food for men and bairns
alike. As for the gudewives' household necessaries, they were got by the
carrier who passed once a fortnight on their road; and for the rest, if
aught was wanting more than that which they had, they did without, and,
according to the local saying, "want was t' master."

Society of a cultured kind there was none. The clergyman was an old man
little if it all superior to the flock to which he ministered. He was a
St. Bees man, the son of a handloom weaver, speaking broad Cumberland
and hopelessly "dished" by a hard word in the Bible. He was fond of his
glass, and was to be found every day of his life from three to nine at
the Blucher, smoking a clay pipe and drinking rum and milk. He had never
married, but he was by no means an ascetic in his morals