One of the farms on the cliff had lately been taken by Sylvia’s father.  He was a man who had roamed about a good deal—­been sailor, smuggler, horse-dealer, and farmer in turns; a sort of fellow possessed by a spirit of adventure and love of change, which did him and his own family more harm than anybody else.  He was just the kind of man that all his neighbours found fault with, and all his neighbours liked.  Late in life (for such an imprudent man as he, was one of a class who generally wed, trusting to chance and luck for the provision for a family), farmer Robson married a woman whose only want of practical wisdom consisted in taking him for a husband.  She was Philip Hepburn’s aunt, and had had the charge of him until she married from her widowed brother’s house.  He it was who had let her know when Haytersbank Farm had been to let; esteeming it a likely piece of land for his uncle to settle down upon, after a somewhat unprosperous career of horse-dealing.  The farmhouse lay in the shelter of a very slight green hollow scarcely scooped out of the pasture field by which it was surrounded; the short crisp turf came creeping up to the very door and windows, without any attempt at a yard or garden, or any nearer enclosure of the buildings than the stone dyke that formed the boundary of the field itself.  The buildings were long and low, in order to avoid the rough violence of the winds that swept over that wild, bleak spot, both in winter and summer.  It was well for the inhabitants of that house that coal was extremely cheap; otherwise a southerner might have imagined that they could never have survived the cutting of the bitter gales that piped all round, and seemed to seek out every crevice for admission into the house.

But the interior was warm enough when once you had mounted the long bleak lane, full of round rough stones, enough to lame any horse unaccustomed to such roads, and had crossed the field by the little dry, hard footpath, which tacked about so as to keep from directly facing the prevailing wind.  Mrs. Robson was a Cumberland woman, and as such, was a cleaner housewife than the farmers’ wives of that north-eastern coast, and was often shocked at their ways, showing it more by her looks than by her words, for she was not a great talker.  This fastidiousness in such matters made her own house extremely comfortable, but did not tend to render her popular among her neighbours.  Indeed, Bell Robson piqued herself on her housekeeping generally, and once in-doors in the gray, bare stone house, there were plenty of comforts to be had besides cleanliness and warmth.  The great rack of clap-bread hung overhead, and Bell Robson’s preference of this kind of oat-cake over the leavened and partly sour kind used in Yorkshire was another source of her unpopularity.  Flitches of bacon and ‘hands’ (i.e., shoulders of cured pork, the legs or hams being sold, as fetching a better price) abounded; and for any visitor who could stay, neither cream nor finest wheaten flour was wanting for ‘turf cakes’ and ‘singing hinnies,’ with which it is the delight of the northern housewives to regale the honoured guest, as he sips their high-priced tea, sweetened with dainty sugar.