In all other directions we were four or five times that distance from neighbors.

Being very poor people, this lonely situation had one great attraction for us--we lived rent free on it.

In addition to that advantage, the stones, by shaping which my father gained his livelihood, lay all about him at his very door, so that he thought his position, solitary as it was, quite an enviable one.
I can hardly say that I agreed with him, though I never complained.
I was very fond of my father, and managed to make the best of my loneliness with the thought of being useful to him.

Mrs.Knifton wished to take me into her service when she married, but I declined, unwillingly enough, for my father's sake.

If I had gone away, he would have had nobody to live with him; and my mother made me promise on her death-bed that he should never be left to pine away alone in the midst of the bleak moor.
Our cottage, small as it was, was stoutly and snugly built, with stone from the moor as a matter of course.