Until she was nineteen years old, Dorothy lived a very uneventful life; for one week was much the same as another in the placid existence of the village.  On Sunday mornings, when the church-bells began to ring, you would meet her walking over the moor with a springy step.  Her shawl was gay, and her dress was of the most pronounced colour that could be bought in the market-town.  Her brown hair was gathered in a net, and her calm eyes looked from under an old-fashioned bonnet of straw.  Her feet were always bare, but she carried her shoes and stockings slung over her shoulder.  When she got near the church she sat down in the shade of a hedge and put them on; then she walked the rest of the distance with a cramped and civilized gait.  On the Monday mornings early she carried the water from the well.  Her great “skeel” was poised easily on her head; and, as she strode along singing lightly without shaking a drop of water over the edge of her pail, you could see how she had come by her erect carriage.  When the boats came in, she went to the beach and helped to carry the baskets of fish to the cart.  She was then dressed in a sort of thick flannel blouse and a singular quantity of brief petticoats.  Her head was bare, and she looked far better than in her Sunday clothes.  If the morning were fine she sat out in the sun and baited the lines, all the while lilting old country songs in her guttural dialect.  In the evening she would spend some time chatting with other lasses in the Row; but she never had a very long spell of that pastime, for she had to be at work winter and summer by about five or six in the morning.  The fisher-folk do not waste many candles by keeping late hours.  She was very healthy and powerful, very ignorant, and very modest.  Had she lived by one of the big harbours, where fleets of boats come in, she might have been as rough and brazen as the girls often are in those places.  But in her secluded little village the ways of the people were old-fashioned and decorous; and girls were very restrained in their manners.  No one would have taken her to be anything more than an ordinary country girl had not a chance enabled her to show herself full of bravery and resource.

Every boat in the village went away North one evening, and not a man remained in the Row excepting three very old fellows, who were long past work of any kind.  When a fisherman grows helpless with age he is kept by his own people, and his days are passed in quietly smoking on the kitchen settle or in looking dimly out over the sea from the bench at the door.  But a man must be sorely “failed” before he is reduced to idleness, and able to do nothing that needs strength.  A southerly gale, with a southerly sea, came away in the night, and the boats could not beat down from the northward.  By daylight they were all safe in a harbour about eighteen miles north of the village.  The sea grew worse and worse, till the usual clouds of foam flew against the