There was a little thatched out-house or shed in front of the cottage, and from thence, hour after hour, as long as daylight lasted, might be heard the sound of chopping up wood. It was by this, that Mytton gained his living; for, except in harvest-time, and then rarely, he never worked as a day-labourer for any of the farmers around. Wood-chopping seemed to come as natural to the Mytton family as flying does to birds, or swimming to fishes. Mrs. Mytton had been chopping in the shed but the day before she died, and on the evening after the poor woman's funeral, when her sorrowing family returned from the churchyard, they set to chopping again. Mytton might be seen constantly at work, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, showing his hairy freckled arms as he steadily plied the hatchet. He was a hard-featured, stern-looking man, with rough grizzled chin, and cheeks shaven but once a month, and his appearance was that of one who had had a long struggle with want and care. Mytton's trials, however, had rather soured than subdued him; he was a prouder man in his cottage than Sir Marmaduke in his castle. The wood-chopper was wont to tell his children on winter evenings how his grandfather's grandfather had been a gentleman, and a mighty rich one too, who had owned more acres of land in Shropshire than there were sedges round the pool; who had kept twenty hunters in his stables, and had gone up to London once every year in a family coach drawn by six fine grey horses. The little Myttons, shivering in their cold cottage, used to listen to their father's accounts of such grandeur in bygone days, much as they would have listened to fairy stories. They knew that they neither fared better, nor worked the less hard, because they bore the name of some grand squire who had lived at a time which seemed to them as far back as that of the Deluge. The fine family coach was to the young wood-choppers much the same kind of thing as that which Cinderella's fairy in the story made out of a pumpkin. When the tale had been told, the cottage children went to their beds, and thought very little more about the grandeur of olden times. All but Amy, the eldest girl, a shy and thoughtful child, with large forehead and earnest brown eyes, which seemed never to rest on the objects near her, but to be looking for something beyond. As Amy's eyes, so was her mind; in her secluded cottage home, the girl was living in a little world of her own.