the village of Priory Leas--almost the one pretty spot thereabout. It
lay in a valley in the midst of hills, which did not look high,
because they rose with a gentle slope, and had no bold elevations or
grand-shaped peaks. But they rose to a good height notwithstanding, and
the weather on the top of them in the wintertime was often bitter and
fierce--bitter with keen frost, and fierce with as wild winds as ever
blew. Of both frost and wind the village at their feet had its share
too, but of course they were not so bad down below, for the hills were a
shelter from the wind, and it is always colder the farther you go up and
away from the heart of this warm ball of rock and earth upon which we
live. When Willie's father was riding across the great moorland of those
desolate hills, and the people in the village would be saying to each
other how bitterly cold it was, he would be thinking how snug and warm
it was down there, and how nice it would be to turn a certain corner on
the road back, and slip at once out of the freezing wind that had it all
its own way up among the withered gorse and heather of the wide expanse
where he pursued his dreary journey.

For his part, Willie cared very little what the weather was, but took it
as it came. In the hot summer, he would lie in the long grass and get
cool; in the cold winter, he would scamper about and get warm. When his
hands were as cold as icicles, his cheeks would be red as apples. When
his mother took his hands in hers, and chafed them, full of pity for
their suffering, as she thought it, Willie first knew that they were
cold by the sweet warmth of the kind hands that chafed them: he had
not thought of it before. Climbing amongst the ruins of the Priory, or
playing with Farmer Thomson's boys and girls about the ricks in his
yard, in the thin clear saffron twilight which came so early after noon,
when, to some people, every breath seemed full of needle-points, so
sharp was the cold, he was as comfortable and happy as if he had been a