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 unnecessary 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 its members 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 (such as 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.
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