This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk from the 1896 "Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales" Macmillan and Co. edition.
HALF A LIFE-TIME AGO.
by Elizabeth Gaskell
CHAPTER I.
Half a life-time ago, there lived in one of the Westmoreland dales a single woman, of the name of Susan Dixon. She was owner of the small farm-house where she resided, and of some thirty or forty acres of land by which it was surrounded. She had also an hereditary right to a sheep-walk, extending to the wild fells that overhang Blea Tarn. In the language of the country she was a Stateswoman. Her house is yet to be seen on the Oxenfell road, between Skelwith and Coniston. You go along a moorland track, made by the carts that occasionally came for turf from the Oxenfell. A brook babbles and brattles by the