Goody Dickisson, the miller's wife, was a fat, round, pursy dame, of
some forty years' travel through this wilderness of sorrow, and a
decent, honest, sober, and well-conditioned housewife she was; cleanly,
thrifty, and had an excellent cheesepress, which the whole neighbourhood
could testify.
But the days of man's happiness are numbered, and woman's too, as the
following narrative will set forth.
The mill had stood, for ages it may be, at the foot of a wild and steep
cliff, forming the eastern extremity of the dreary range of
Cliviger;[37] an elevated mountainous pass, from whence the waters
descend both to the eastern and western seas. Upon those almost
inaccessible crags the rock-eagle and falcon built their nests, unscared
by the herdsmen, who in vain attempted their destruction. Through this
pass, the very gorge of the English Apennines, the Calder,[38] a rapid
and narrow torrent, brought an unfailing supply of grist to the
ever-going hopper of Giles Dickisson.
Not far from this happy abode, in the innermost part of the gorge, where
the rocks of Lancashire and Yorkshire frown in close but harmless
proximity, at an immense height,--the road and this narrow cleft only
separating their barriers,--rises a crag of a singular shape, jutting
far out from the almost perpendicular strata beneath.
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