tersected here
and there by streamlets. The nearest habitation to ours was situated
about a mile and a half off, where a strip of the fertile land stretched
out into the waste like a tongue. Here the outbuildings of the great
Moor Farm, then in the possession of my husband's father, began. The
farm-lands stretched down gently into a beautiful rich valley, lying
nicely sheltered by the high platform of the moor. When the ground began
to rise again, miles and miles away, it led up to a country house called
Holme Manor, belonging to a gentleman named Knifton. Mr. Knifton
had lately married a young lady whom my mother had nursed, and whose
kindness and friendship for me, her foster-sister, I shall remember
gratefully to the last day of my life. These and other slight
particulars it is necessary to my story that I should tell you, and it
is also necessary that you should be especially careful to bear them
well in mind.

My father was by trade a stone-mason. His cottage stood a mile and a
half from the nearest habitation. In all other directions we were four
or five times that distance from neighbors. Being very poor people, this
lonely situation had one great attraction for us--we lived rent free
on it. In addition to that advantage, the stones, by shaping which my
father gained his livelihood, lay all about him at his very door, so
that he thought his position, solitary as it was, quite an enviable one.
I can hardly say that I agreed with him, though I never complained.
I was very fond of my father, and managed to make the best of my
loneliness with the thought of being useful to him. Mrs. Knifton
wished to take me into her service when she married, but I declined,
unwillingly enough, for my father's sake. If I had gone away, he would
have had nobody to live with him; and my mother made me promise on her
death-bed that he should never be left to pine away alone in the midst
of the bleak moor.

Our cottage, small as it was, was stoutly and snugly built, with stone
from the moor as a matter of course. The walls were lined inside and
fenced outside with wood, the gift of Mr. Knifton's father to my father.
This double covering of cracks and crevices, which would have been
superfluous in a sheltered position, was absolutely necessary, in our
exposed situation, to keep out the cold winds which, excepting just the
summer months, swept over us continually all the year round. The outside
boards, covering our roughly-built stone wa