[Illustration:  030.jpg Father was found dead on the moor]

It was more of woe than wonder, being such days of violence, that mother knew herself a widow, and her children fatherless.  Of children there were only three, none of us fit to be useful yet, only to comfort mother, by making her to work for us.  I, John Ridd, was the eldest, and felt it a heavy thing on me; next came sister Annie, with about two years between us; and then the little Eliza.

Now, before I got home and found my sad loss—­and no boy ever loved his father more than I loved mine—­mother had done a most wondrous thing, which made all the neighbours say that she must be mad, at least.  Upon the Monday morning, while her husband lay unburied, she cast a white hood over her hair, and gathered a black cloak round her, and, taking counsel of no one, set off on foot for the Doone-gate.

In the early afternoon she came to the hollow and barren entrance, where in truth there was no gate, only darkness to go through.  If I get on with this story, I shall have to tell of it by-and-by, as I saw it afterwards; and will not dwell there now.  Enough that no gun was fired at her, only her eyes were covered over, and somebody led her by the hand, without any wish to hurt her.

A very rough and headstrong road was all that she remembered, for she could not think as she wished to do, with the cold iron pushed against her.  At the end of this road they delivered her eyes, and she could scarce believe them.

For she stood at the head of a deep green valley, carved from out the mountains in a perfect oval, with a fence of sheer rock standing round it, eighty feet or a hundred high; from whose brink black wooded hills swept up to the sky-line.  By her side a little river glided out from underground with a soft dark babble, unawares of daylight; then growing brighter, lapsed away, and fell into the valley.  Then, as it ran down the meadow, alders stood on either marge, and grass was blading out upon it, and yellow tufts of rushes gathered, looking at the hurry.  But further down, on either bank, were covered houses built of stone, square and roughly cornered, set as if the brook were meant to be the street between them.  Only one room high they were, and not placed opposite each other, but in and out as skittles are; only that the first of all, which proved to be the captain’s, was a sort of double house, or rather two houses joined together by a plank-bridge, over the river.

Fourteen cots my mother counted, all very much of a pattern, and nothing to choose between them, unless it were the captain’s.  Deep in the quiet valley there, away from noise, and violence, and brawl, save that of the rivulet, any man would have deemed them homes of simple mind and innocence.  Yet not a single house stood there but was the home of murder.

Two men led my mother down a steep and gliddery stair-way, like the ladder of a hay-mow; and thence from the break of the falling water as far as the house of the captain.  And there at the door they left her trembling, strung as she was, to speak her mind.