give pride of place to Martha Hessletine.

Martha Hessletine was always known in the village as Grannie. She was
everybody's Grannie. Crippled with rheumatism, she had kept to her bed
for years, and there she held levees, with all the dignity of bearing
that one might expect from a French princess in the days of the _grand
monarque_. The village children would pay her a visit on their way home
from afternoon school, and of an evening her kitchen hearth, near to
which her bed was always placed by day, was the Parliament House for all
the neighbouring farms. What Grannie did not know of the life of the
village and the dale was certainly not worth knowing.

Grannie's one luxury was a good fire. A fire, she used to say, gave you
three things in one--warmth, and light, and company. Usually she burnt
coal, but when the peats, which had been cut and dried on the moors in
June, were brought down to the farms on sledges, her neighbours would
often send her as a present a barrow-load of them. These would last her
for a long time, and the pungent, aromatic smell of the burning turf
would greet one long before her kitchen door was reached.

I was sitting by her fireside one evening, and it was of the peat that
she was speaking.

"We allus used to burn peats on our farm," she said, "and varra warm
they were of a winter neet. We'd no kitchen range i' yon days, but a
gert oppen fireplace, wheer thou could look up the chimley and see the
stars shining of a frosty neet."

"But doesn't a peat fire give off a terrible lot of ash?" I asked.