farmers who owned or hired the land which lay directly on the summit
of these cliffs were smugglers to the extent of their power, only
partially checked by the coast-guard distributed, at pretty nearly
equal interspaces of eight miles, all along the north-eastern
seaboard. Still sea-wrack was a good manure, and there was no law
against carrying it up in great osier baskets for the purpose of
tillage, and many a secret thing was lodged in hidden crevices in
the rocks till the farmer sent trusty people down to the shore for a
good supply of sand and seaweed for his land.

One of the farms on the cliff had lately been taken by Sylvia's
father. He was a man who had roamed about a good deal--been sailor,
smuggler, horse-dealer, and farmer in turns; a sort of fellow
possessed by a spirit of adventure and love of change, which did him
and his own family more harm than anybody else. He was just the kind
of man that all his neighbours found fault with, and all his
neighbours liked. Late in life (for such an imprudent man as he, was
one of a class who generally wed, trusting to chance and luck for
the provision for a family), farmer Robson married a woman whose
only want of practical wisdom consisted in taking him for a husband.
She was Philip Hepburn's aunt, and had had the charge of him until
she married from her widowed brother's house. He it was who had let
her know when Haytersbank Farm had been to let; esteeming it a
likely piece of land for his uncle to settle down upon, after a
somewhat unprosperous career of horse-dealing. The farmhouse lay in
the shelter of a very slight green hollow scarcely scooped out of
the pasture field by which it was surrounded; the short crisp turf
came creeping up to the very door and windows, without any attempt
at a yard or garden, or any nearer enclosure of the buildings than
the stone dyke that formed the boundary of the field itself. The