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