will. Moreover he had his books, and me;
and as he always spoke out his thoughts, he seldom grudged to thank the
Lord for having left both of these to him. I felt a little jealous of
his books now and then, as a very poor scholar might be; but reason is
the proper guide for women, and we are quick enough in discerning it,
without having to borrow it from books.

At any rate now we were living in a wood, and trees were the only
creatures near us, to the best of our belief and wish. Few might say in
what part of the wood we lived, unless they saw the smoke ascending from
our single chimney; so thick were the trees, and the land they stood
on so full of sudden rise and fall. But a little river called the Lynn
makes a crooked border to it, and being for its size as noisy a water as
any in the world perhaps, can be heard all through the trees and leaves
to the very top of the Warren Wood. In the summer all this was sweet
and pleasant; but lonely and dreary and shuddersome, when the twigs bore
drops instead of leaves, and the ground would not stand to the foot, and
the play of light and shadow fell, like the lopping of a tree, into one
great lump.

Now there was a young man about this time, and not so very distant from
our place--as distances are counted there--who managed to make himself
acquainted with us, although we lived so privately. To me it was a
marvel, both why and how he did it; seeing what little we had to offer,
and how much we desired to live alone. But Mrs. Pring told me to look in
the glass, if I wanted to know the reason; and while I was blushing with
anger at that, being only just turned eighteen years, and thinking of
nobody but my father, she asked if I had never heard the famous rhymes
made by the wise woman at Tarrsteps:

"Three fair maids live upon Exymoor,
The rocks, and the woods, and the dairy-door.
The son of a baron shall woo all three,
But barren of them all shall the young man be."

Of the countless things I could never understand, one of the very
strangest was how Deborah Pring, our only domestic, living in the lonely
depths of this great wood, and seeming to see nobody but ourselves,
in spite of all that contrived to know as much of the doings of the
neighbourhood as if she went to market twice a week. But my father cared
little for any such stuff; coming from a better part of the world, and
having been mixed with mighty issues and making of great kin