I know every man, woman, and
child in the whole country-side, and that makes all the difference." You
see, therefore, that he was a good kind-hearted man, and loved his work,
for the sake of those whom he helped by it, better than the money he
received for it.
Their home was necessarily a very humble one--a neat little cottage in
the village of Priory Leas--almost the one pretty spot thereabout. It
lay in a valley in the midst of hills, which did not look high,
because they rose with a gentle slope, and had no bold elevations or
grand-shaped peaks. But they rose to a good height notwithstanding, and
the weather on the top of them in the wintertime was often bitter and
fierce--bitter with keen frost, and fierce with as wild winds as ever
blew. Of both frost and wind the village at their feet had its share
too, but of course they were not so bad down below, for the hills were a
shelter from the wind, and it is always colder the farther you go up and
away from the heart of this warm ball of rock and earth upon which we
live. When Willie's father was riding across the great moorland of those
desolate hills, and the people in the village would be saying to each
other how bitterly cold it was, he would be thinking how snug and warm
it was down there, and how nice it would be to turn a certain corner on
the road back, and slip at once out of the freezing wind that had it all
its own way up among the withered gorse and heather of the wide expanse
where he pursued his dreary journey.
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