Oliver Tredethlyn had not been actuated by any Quixotic motive in this eccentric choice of a servant. He took his housekeeper from the wayside because he saw in her a stuff he had vainly sought in the pampered menials who had hitherto presented themselves to his notice. He had been attracted to Martha in the first instance by her gaunt face and gaunter figure, which would have been sufficiently alarming in one of King Frederick William’s chosen grenadiers. He had been attracted still more by her curt answers to his curt questions, in which she told him that she had walked thirty miles that day before lying down, as she believed, to die; that she had walked twenty miles the day before, and five-and-twenty the day before that; that she had not tasted food for the last eight-and-forty hours; and that she had worked in the fields and lived upon an average of two-pence a day ever since she could remember. It was upon this that a bargain was struck between Oliver Tredethlyn, of Tredethlyn Grange, of the one part, and Martha Blank, Martha Anybody, of the other part, for the poor creature had no knowledge of any special surname to which she might lay claim. She had been called Carroty Jane in one place because her hair was red and her name was not Jane. She had been called Gawky Bet, and Lanky Poll, at other places, on account of her abnormal height; but the name she had received in the Union, where her earlier years had been passed, was Martha, and it was this name which she herself recognised as her legitimate appellation. She went home with Oliver Tredethlyn in one of his empty waggons, and ate her first spare meal in the Grange kitchen before nightfall; and from that hour until the old man’s death she served him well and faithfully. She lived with him all the days of his bachelorhood, and resignedly united herself to his bailiff when he commanded her so to do. This faithful creature welcomed Mr. Tredethlyn’s wife when he took it into his head to bring home a small tenant-farmer’s pretty daughter, who had been forced into a marriage with a man whom she detested; and, faithful and untiring to the last, this rough-handed, brawny-armed servant watched by the young wife’s sick bed during those dull years in which she slowly withered and faded, from a fresh, blooming girl, into a prematurely old woman, and so sank by lingering stages into an early grave, leaving behind her one only child, whose infancy and girlhood were brightened by no softer light than such as might be shed from the grim, grenadier-like affection of Martha Dryscoll.