

Transcribed from the 1896 “Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales” Macmillan and
Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org





                          HALF A LIFE-TIME AGO.


CHAPTER I.


HALF a life-time ago, there lived in one of the Westmoreland dales a
single woman, of the name of Susan Dixon.  She was owner of the small
farm-house where she resided, and of some thirty or forty acres of land
by which it was surrounded.  She had also an hereditary right to a
sheep-walk, extending to the wild fells that overhang Blea Tarn.  In the
language of the country she was a Stateswoman.  Her house is yet to be
seen on the Oxenfell road, between Skelwith and Coniston.  You go along a
moorland track, made by the carts that occasionally came for turf from
the Oxenfell.  A brook babbles and brattles by the wayside, giving you a
sense of companionship, which relieves the deep solitude in which this
way is usually traversed.  Some miles on this side of Coniston there is a
farmstead—a gray stone 