Grey sky, brown waters: as a bird that flies My heart flits forth to these;Back to the winter rose of Northern skies, Back to the Northern seas.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. — THE WORLD SHE LIVED IN
CHAPTER II. — CHRISTINA AND ANDREW
CHAPTER III. — THE AILING HEART
CHAPTER IV. — THE LAST OF THE WHIP
CHAPTER VI. — WHERE IS MY MONEY?
CHAPTER VII. — THE BEGINNING OF THE END
CHAPTER VIII. — A GREAT DELIVERANCE
CHAPTER IX. — THE RIGHTING OF A WRONG
CHAPTER X. — “TAKE ME IN TO DIE!”
CHAPTER XI. — DRIVEN TO HIS DUTY
CHAPTER XII. — AMONG HER OWN PEOPLE
CHAPTER XIII. — THE “LITTLE SOPHY”
It would be easy to walk many a time through “Fife and all the lands about it” and never once find the little fishing village of Pittendurie. Indeed, it would be a singular thing if it was found, unless some special business or direction led to it. For clearly it was never intended that human beings should build homes where these cottages cling together, between sea and sky,—a few here, and a few there, hidden away in every bend of the rocks where a little ground could be levelled, so that the tides in stormy weather break with threat and fury on the very doorstones of the lowest cottages. Yet as the lofty semicircle of hills bend inward, the sea follows; and there is a fair harbour, where the fishing boats ride together while their sails dry in the afternoon sun. Then the hamlet is very still; for the men are sleeping off the weariness of their night work, while the children play quietly among the tangle, and the women mend the nets or bait the lines for the next fishing. A lonely little spot, shut in by sea and land, and yet life is there in all its passionate variety—love and hate, jealousy and avarice, youth, with its ideal sorrows and infinite expectations, age, with its memories and regrets, and “sure and certain hope.”
The cottages also have their individualities. Although they are much of the same size and pattern, an observing eye would have picked out the Binnie cottage as distinctive and prepossessing. Its outside walls were as white as lime could make them; its small windows brightened with geraniums and a white muslin curtain; and the litter of ropes and nets and drying fish which encumbered the majority of thatches, was pleasantly absent. Standing on a little level, thirty feet abov