They were rude sons and daughters of the hills who inhabited this mountain home two centuries ago.  The country around them was alive with ghostly legend.  They had seen the lights dance across Deer Garth Ghyll, and had heard the wail that came from Clark’s Loup.  They were not above trembling at the mention of these mysteries when the moon was flying across a darksome sky, when the wind moaned about the house, and they were gathered around the ingle nook.  They had few channels of communication with the great world without.  The pack-horse pedler was their swiftest newsman; the pedler on foot was their weekly budget.  Five miles along the pack-horse road to the north stood their market town of Gaskarth, where they took their wool or the cloth they had woven from it.  From the top of Lauvellen they could see the white sails of the ships that floated down the broad Solway.  These were all but their only glimpses of the world beyond their mountains.  It was a mysterious and fearsome world.

There was, however, one link that connected the people of Wythburn with the world outside.  To the north of the city and the mere there lived a family of sheep farmers who were known as the Rays of Shoulthwaite Moss.  The family consisted of husband and wife and two sons.  The head of the house, Angus Ray, came to the district early in life from the extreme Cumbrian border.  He was hardly less than a giant in stature.  He had limbs of great length, and muscles like the gnarled heads of a beech.  Upon settling at Wythburn, he speedily acquired property of various kinds, and in the course of a few years he was the largest owner of sheep on the country side.  Certainly, fortune favored Angus Ray, and not least noticeably when in due course he looked about him for a wife.

Mary Ray did not seem to have many qualities in common with her husband.  She had neither the strength of limb nor the agile grace of the mountaineer.  This was partly the result of the conditions under which her girlhood had been spent.  She was the only child of a dalesman, who had so far accumulated estate in land as to be known in the vernacular as a statesman.  Her mother had died at her birth, and before she had attained to young womanhood her father, who had married late in life, was feeble and unfit for labor.  His hand was too nervous, his eye too uncertain, his breath too short for the constant risks of mountaineering; so he put away all further thought of adding store to store, and settled himself peaceably in his cottage under Castenand, content with the occasional pleasures afforded by his fiddle, an instrument upon which he had from his youth upward shown some skill.  In this quiet life his daughter was his sole companion.