as far worse off than a widow, for her husband had just been sentenced
to transportation for twenty-one years--strayed down to these mountains
upon her sorrowful way home to her native place. She had her only child
with her, a boy five years of age; and from some reason or other, perhaps
because she could not bear to go home in shame and disgrace, she sought
out a very lonely hiding-place among the hills, and with her own hands
reared rough walls of turf and stones, until she had formed such a rude
hut as would just give shelter to her and her boy. There they lived,
uncared for and solitary, until the husband came back, after suffering
his twenty-one years' punishment, and entered into a little spot of land
entirely his own. Then, with the assistance of his son, a strong,
full-grown young man, he rebuilt the cottage, though upon a scale not
much larger or much more commodious than his wife's old hut.

Like other groups of mountains, the highest and largest are those near
the centre, and from them the land descends in lower and lower levels,
with smaller hills and smoother valleys, until at length it sinks into
the plain. Then they are almost like children's hills and valleys; the
slopes are not too steep for very little feet to climb, and the rippling
brooks are not in so much hurry to rush on to the distant river, but that
boys and girls at play can stop them for a little time with slight banks
of mud and stones. In just such a smooth, sloping dell, down in a soft
green basin, called Fern's Hollow, was the hiding-place where the
convict's sad wife had found an unmolested shelter.

This dwelling, the second one raised by the returned convict and his son,
is built just below the brow of the hill, so that the back of the hut is
formed of the hill itself, and only the sides and front are real walls.
These walls are made of rubble, or loose, unhewn stones, piled together
with a kind of mortar, which is little more than clay baked hard in the
heat of the sun. The chimney is a bit of old stove-pipe, scarcely rising
above the top of the hill behind; and, but for the smoke, we could look
down the pipe, as through the tube of a telescope, upon the family
sitting round the hearth within. The thatch, overgrown with moss, appears
as a continuation of the slope of the hill itself, and might almost
deceive the simple sheep grazing around it. Instead of a window there is
only a square hole, covered by a shutter when the light is not ur