Excerpt from The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist: A Fragment of a Life My father was married young, being at the time little more than twenty. My mother was his senior by a year or two. He brought her to his ancestral home, in a row of houses which faced the church. It was built of stone, and thatched, like all the others in the village (except the vicar's); a large rambling house with plenty of room in it; the...