Before I knew of any world beyond the mill and Bracken Glen, I thought it was a busy and cheerful place. Now that I come to look back on it I know it was one of the most desolate and lonely situations in all England. People talk of the woes of solitude in the forest, in an unpeopled island, in a crowd. But the most terrible and corroding solitude of all is that of a small group of human beings, a large family sunk deep among mountains far out of the reach of ordinary human intercourse, and living in such strict customs and observances as obtained at Bracken Glen.
Of course we had the business always going on, and that prevented our people from going mad. But the mill was not in the main road. You had to turn up into the Glen to reach it, and no faces ever appeared in the yard but the faces of people coming on business to the mill.
"I fell grievously ill."
As I have said, I was the youngest of the whole Fowler family, brothers and sisters and cousins. The winter that I was twelve years of age I fell grievously ill, so ill that they thought I should never recover. Then, for the first time, I saw a doctor. Our people had no great faith in doctors, and this was the only occasion on which one had been in Bracken Glen for ten years.
My father and mother were assured that I was certain to die if I were not instantly sent to a milder climate, say the Isle of Wight or some genial part of the South Coast. There was a grave demur, a long debate, and finally I was despatched to the home of a married cousin whose name I had heard and of whom I knew little except that he was the son of my father's eldest sister, that he was not a miller, which was a reproach to him, and that he did not conform to the observances seen at Bracken Glen, or indeed hold the same form of religious belief.
I was too weak and wretched when I left home to care about anything, to care whether I was moved or not, whether I was to taste warmer air or nor, whether I lived or not. If they would only let me alone I think I should have preferred to die.
I was taken from the cold, bleak, northern Glen where, although we ground corn never any grew, and carried hundreds of miles south; an interminable journey, it seemed to my young mind and feeble, sensitive body.
All through that winter I was delicate, and not allowed out of doors. My cousin's name was Harding. I had never met either him or his wife before. He was about thirty, and she twenty-five. They were simple people, with much of the hereditary aversion from frivolity, but they were not dogmatic or censorious, and they were beyond and above all the very kindest people I ever met in all my life. They lived a mile out of the little town of Bickerton, on the high road. They were childless. He traded in corn in Bickerton. The taste for grain seemed to run in the blood of our family.
In my old home my education had not been neglected. I could read and cypher, and I knew the heaviness of all the weights, and the dryness of all the dry measures. My father had taught me the elements of Euclid and Algebra, and I re-
