A CHRISTIAN IN PRIVILEGE.
[CHAPTER I.]
The Lonely Cot.
LONELY was the little cottage in which dwelt Silas Mytton, the hewer and chopper of firewood. It stood in a corner of a heath, with not another house near it, and all the winds could sweep over it unchecked from every quarter. It was a small patched-up place, with one little window at the side of the door, and above it another peeping from under the low thatched roof. The cottage had been scarcely large enough to hold Silas, his wife, and their five children; but now Mrs. Mytton was dead, and the eldest boy had gone to sea.
The common looked pleasant enough in the summer, when the blossoms on the flags showed like white feathers round the patches of water, and the heather purpled the ground, and yellow furze dotted it with gold, and geese fed there, and donkeys browsed, and butterflies fluttered over the honied wild-flowers.
But a very dreary place looked the common in winter, when the heath was brown, and the blossoms dead, and the patches of water grew broader and larger, and all around them was swamp, till sharp frost turned the water into ice, and the north wind rushed wildly across the waste, and covered it with snow. Mytton's cottage was then a dreary abode indeed, for seldom did any one care to go near it, and the wind not only swept over but through it, at least so it seemed to the dwellers therein.
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.