But why should her father have been ignored in these family arrangements?  Perhaps it may almost suffice to say, that of all living men her father was the man best conversant with the antiquities of the county in which he lived.  He was the Jonathan Oldbuck of Devonshire, and especially of Dartmoor,—­but without that decision of character which enabled Oldbuck to keep his womenkind in some kind of subjection, and probably enabled him also to see that his weekly bill did not pass their proper limits.  Our Mr. Oldbuck, of Oxney Colne, was sadly deficient in these respects.  As a parish pastor with but a small cure he did his duty with sufficient energy to keep him, at any rate, from reproach.  He was kind and charitable to the poor, punctual in his services, forbearing with the farmers around him, mild with his brother clergymen, and indifferent to aught that bishop or archdeacon might think or say of him.  I do not name this latter attribute as a virtue, but as a fact.  But all these points were as nothing in the known character of Mr. Woolsworthy, of Oxney Colne.  He was the antiquarian of Dartmoor.  That was his line of life.  It was in that capacity that he was known to the Devonshire world; it was as such that he journeyed about with his humble carpetbag, staying away from his parsonage a night or two at a time; it was in that character that he received now and again stray visitors in the single spare bedroom—­not friends asked to see him and his girl because of their friendship—­but men who knew something as to this buried stone, or that old land-mark.  In all these things his daughter let him have his own way, assisting and encouraging him.  That was his line of life, and therefore she respected it.  But in all other matters she chose to be paramount at the parsonage.

Mr. Woolsworthy was a little man, who always wore, except on Sundays, grey clothes—­clothes of so light a grey that they would hardly have been regarded as clerical in a district less remote.  He had now reached a goodly age, being full seventy years old; but still he was wiry and active, and shewed but few symptoms of decay.  His head was bald, and the few remaining locks that surrounded it were nearly white.  But there was a look of energy about his mouth, and a humour in his light grey eye, which forbade those who knew him to regard him altogether as an old man.  As it was, he could walk from Oxney Colne to Priestown, fifteen long Devonshire miles across the moor; and he who could do that could hardly be regarded as too old for work.

But our present story will have more to do with his daughter than with him.  A pretty girl, I have said, was Patience Woolsworthy; and one, too, in many ways remarkable.  She had taken her outlook into life, weighing the things which she had and those which she had not, in a manner very unusual, and, as a rule, not always desirable for a young lady.  The things which she had not were very many.  She had not society; she had not a fortune; she had