long; would be perfectly content with a share
of the food which she provided for herself; or
would procure what they required from the
Waterhead Inn at Coniston. But no liberal
sum— no fair words— moved her from her
stony manner, or her monotonous tone of
indifferent refusal. No persuasion could
induce her  to show any more of the house
than that first room; no appearance of fatigue
procured for the weary an invitation to sit
down and rest; and if one more bold and less
delicate sate down without being asked,
Susan stood by, cold and apparently deaf, or
only replying by the briefest monosyllables,
till the unwelcome visitor had departed.
Yet those with whom she had dealings in the
way of selling her cattle or her farm produce,
spoke of her as keen after a bargain— a hard
one to have to do with; and she never spared
herself exertion or fatigue, at market or in
the field, to make the most of her produce.
She led the haymakers with her swift steady
rake, and her noiseless evenness of motion.
She was about among the earliest in the
market, examining samples of oats, pricing
them, and then turning with grim satisfaction
to her own cleaner corn.

She was served faithfully and long by those
who were rather her fellow-labourers than
her servants. She was even and just in her
dealings with them. If she was peculiar and
silent, they knew her, and knew that she
might be relied on. Some of them had known
her from her childhood; and deep in their
hearts was an unspoken— almost unconscious —
pity for her; for they knew her story,
though they never spoke of it.

Yes; the time had been when that tall,
gaunt, hard-featured, angular woman— who
never smiled, and hardly ever spoke an
unncessary word— had been a fine-looking girl,
bright-spirited and rosy; and when the hearth
at the Yew Nook had been as bright as she,
with family love and youthful hope and
mirth. Fifty or fifty-one years ago, William
Dixon and his wife Margaret were alive;
and Susan, their daughter, was about eighteen
years old— ten years older than the only other
child, a boy, named after his father. William
and Margaret Dixon were rather superior
people, of a character belonging— as far as I
have seen— exclusively to the class of
Westmoreland and Cumberland statesmen,— just,
independent, upright; not given to much
speaking; kind-hearted, but not demonstrative;
disliking change, and new ways, and
new people; sensible and shrewd; each
household self-contained, and having little curiosity
as to their neighbours, with whom they
rarely met for any social intercourse, save at
the stated times of sheep-shearing and Christmas;
having a certain kind of sober pleasure
in amassing money, which occasionally made
them miserable (as they call miserly people
up in the north) in their old age; reading no
light or ephemeral literature, but the grave,
solid books brought round by the pedlars (the
Paradise Lost and Regained, the Death of
Abel, the Spiritual Quixote, and the Pilgrim's
Progress) were to be found in nearly every
house: the men occasionally going off laking,
i.e. playing, i.e. drinking for days together,
and having to be hunted up by anxious wives,
who dared not leave their husbands to the
chances of the wild precipitous roads, but
walked miles and miles, lantern in hand, in
the dead of night, to discover and guide the
solemnly-drunken husband home; who had a
dreadful headache the next day, and the day
after that came forth as grave, and sober, and
virtuous-looking as if there were no such
things as malt and spirituous liquors in the
world; and who were seldom reminded of
their misdoings by their wives, to whom such
occasional outbreaks were as things of course,
when once the immediate anxiety produced
by them was over. Such were— such are  —
the characteristics of a class now passing
away from the face of the land, as their compeers,
the yeomen, have done before. Of
such was William Dixon. He was a shrewd
clever farmer, in his day and generation,
when shrewdness was rather shown in the
breeding and rearing of sheep and cattle than
in the cultivation of land. Owing to this
character of his, statesmen from a distance
from beyond Kendal, or from Borrowdale,
of greater wealth than he, would send their
sons to be farm-servants for a year or two
with him, in order to learn some of his
methods before setting up on land of their
own. When Susan, his daughter, was about
seventeen, one Michael Hurst was farm-
servant at Yew Nook. He worked with the
master and lived with the family, and was in
all respects treated as an equal, except in the
field. His father was a wealthy statesman
at Wythburne, up beyond Grasmere; and
through Michael's servitude the families had
become acquainted, and the Dixons went
over to the High Beck sheep-shearing, and
the Hursts came down by Red Bank and
Loughrig Tarn and across the Oxenfell when
there was the Christmas-tide feasting at Yew
Nook. The fathers strolled round the fields
together, examined cattle and sheep, and
looked knowing over each other's horses.
The mothers inspected the dairies and household
arrangements, each openly admiring the
plans of the other, but secretly preferring
their own. Both fathers and mothers cast a
glance from time to time at Michael and
Susan, who were thinking of nothing less
than farm or dairy, but whose unspoken
attachment was in all ways so suitable and
natural a thing that each parent rejoiced
over it, although with characteristic reserve
it was never spoken about- not even between
husband and wife.

Susan had been a strong, independent,
healthy girl; a clever help to her mother
and a spirited companion to her father;
more of a man in her (as he often said) than
her delicate little brother ever would have.