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 them homes of simple mind and
innocence. Yet not a single house stood there but was the home of
murder.

Two men led my mother down a steep and gliddery stair-way, like the
ladder of a hay-mow; and thence from the break of the falling water as
far as the house of the captain. And there at the door they left her
trembling, strung as she was, to speak her mind.

Now, after all, what right had she, a common farmer's widow, to take it
amiss that men of birth thought fit to kill her husband. And the Doones
were of very high birth, as all we clods of Exmoor knew; and we had
enough of good teaching now--let any man say the contrary--to feel that
all we had belonged of right to those above us. Therefore my mother was
half-ashamed that she could not help complaining.

But after a little while, as she said, remembrance of her husband came,
and the way he used to stand by