Elizabeth Murray, the mother, was always considered a woman out of the common. She was tall and strong and handsome even in her old age, and in her youth it was said she had been as powerful as a man, doing many feats of strength altogether beyond the power of either men or women of ordinary calibre. She it was from whom the children took their beauty. It was not beauty of the full-blown rustic kind, but that of finer quality, the only true beauty, perhaps, in the formal meaning of the word: that which involves regularity and nobleness of features rather than the evanescent charms of complexion and colour. Elizabeth was not even exalted enough in position to be called Mrs Murray. She was addressed by everybody by her Christian name. She was a woman who drove her beasts to the field, milked her cows and churned her butter with her own hands, and would hoe and dig her potatoes without flinching, had there been need. But she had the carriage and bearing of a queen, and a majestic style of form and feature such as few queens possess. When she stood in the little market-place in Waterside, with her eggs and chickens for sale, she might have been a Roman matron--Portia, stately in old age, or the mother of Coriolanus. It was said that there was Gipsy blood in her veins, and no one knew where she came from, or how it was that a peaceable countryman like Abel Murray should have wanted to marry her. There were many who did not hesitate to say that she had driven the poor man to death. But it is easy to say such things, and very difficult to prove them. If her strength, high spirit, and imperious temper were too much for him, Abel Murray was not the man to say it; but he died, nevertheless, leaving her open to such accusations, as he might have done had he married a white maiden with no character at all. But he left all he had in her hands, with the three little children, who were as yet too young to be anything but encumbrances; and Elizabeth had worked for her children like a slave, like a heroine. All that they had in the world was a little house among the hills, far from all other habitations of men, and a few bare, unproductive fields, less profitable than they were sacred, as having been "in the family" for generations. Here the widow toiled and struggled alone, telling nobody of her privations and indebted to nobody, making out of her few cows and her poultry-yard enough to support her children and bring them safely through the simple dangers of childhood. From dangers more serious, however, where is the mother, however exalted, who can defend her sons and daughters? She was absolutely and passionately devoted to them, and during all the best years of her life toiled for them night and day; and if afterwards, when those perils befell them which she could not guard them from, Elizabeth, used to sacrifice everything in her own person, became selfish for her children and exacted sacrifices from others, such