She was our refuge in all time of trouble and necessity.

It was she who gave us something to eat as often and as much as we wanted.

She used to say it was no cheating of the minister to feed the minister's boys.
And then her stories! There was nothing like them in all that countryside.

It was rather a dreary country in outward aspect, having many bleak moorland hills, that lay about like slow-stiffened waves, of no great height but of much desolation; and as far as the imagination was concerned, it would seem that the minds of former generations had been as bleak as the country, they had left such small store of legends of any sort.

But Kirsty had come from a region where the hills were hills indeed--hills with mighty skeletons of stone inside them; hills that looked as if they had been heaped over huge monsters which were ever trying to get up--a country where every cliff, and rock, and well had its story--and Kirsty's head was full of such.