The Wordsworth Country on Two Shillings a Day

GOOD taste, good health, good nature, open-mindedness, open-heartedness, ready adaptability, and keen perception are of far more account in foreign travel than much money. While it is reassuring, of course, to have a store of funds to fall back on, the lavish use of money on the road is one of the greatest obstacles to success. Thus, foreign travel, instead of being a peculiar privilege of the rich, as it is usually considered, comes quite as near being a peculiar privilege of the poor. There are annoyances connected with making use of workingmen’s excursions, walking in heat and dust to save carriage hire, riding on night trains to save lodging - bills, selecting dishes for nutriment, attending dull services for views of church interiors, hunting for cheap lodgings when leg - weary. But these very annoyances are pleasant to recall, and they have the compensation, at the time, of bringing their victim into close touch with the average life of average people. Being no novice at cheap travel, the fact that money was not plentiful with me did not hold me back for a moment, when I found myself, in the summer of 189—, with a few weeks on my hands to do with as I would. This time it should be the Wordsworth Country. I would have no set itinerary. I would linger or move on, ride or walk, as my own mood and the mood of the neighborhood might determine. I would tramp much, and saunter more, and lounge most of all. Thus would the fondest dream of half a score of years come true.

At Liverpool I made up an oilcloth pack of only a few pounds’ weight, which could be borne on my back or carried in my hand. It contained several handkerchiefs, two pairs of stockings, buttons, needles, thread, and a change of underwear ; a towel, a bath-sponge, a cake of soap, a toothbrush, a comb, Baedeker’s Great Britain, and Wordsworth’s Poems. For more ready reference, I added to the usual contents of my pockets a flask of whiskey, a few Bath buns, and a canvas-mounted map reduced from the ordnance survey. My other belongings were dispatched to London to await my coming; for I was sure to turn up there sooner or later, as every visitor to England does.

I embarked on a slow and cheap night train for Windermere, the southeastern gateway of the Lake District. Not a soul was stirring in the village when the train arrived, at five o’clock in the morning. It was therefore impossible to get a meal there, and I set out at once for Ambleside, four miles or so to the northward, breakfasting as I went on my Bath buns. The tops of all the mountains were glistering with snow, though it was near the middle of May. The narrow, river-like lake. Windermere, was a turquoise blue ; the sky was cloudless ; the air was at once frosty and fragrant with spring flowers ; the birds were very troubadours. My blood was soon tingling with ozone and exercise. I was buoyant, exultant, mad with delight. In my passion to reach the amphitheatre at the head of the lake, in which I knew Ambleside must be nestled, I fairly ran along the villaed, wooded shore road.

Ambleside, like most of the lake towns, is full of lodgings at from ten to fifteen shillings per week. Cheaper rooms are scarce. So when Mrs. John Hyson offered me a large front chamber, with a glorious outlook on Wansfell Pike, for eight and sixpence, I quickly clinched the bargain. It turned out not to be a bad one, though I afterwards discovered two or three smaller rooms at seven shillings,— just a shilling a night. Mrs. Hyson was eager to give me food as well as lodging ; and I should have much preferred to let her have her way, had she not insisted on two shillings a day for it. As it was, I resisted her importunity, salving her wounded feelings by contracting to have served every morning a sixpenny breakfast, consisting of a pot of tea, dry toast, and eggs or bacon. For the other meals, I gathered from the village stores a goodly supply of easily handled staples — bread and cheese, meat pies, and dried fish—and a few delicacies. In this way I was able to keep my entire daily expenditure down to the two shillings I had set myself as a limit. My method was to eat an eighto’clock breakfast, stow away a good lunch in my pockets, and take to the mountains for the day. On my return at night, I spread out a supper in my room, where a pot of tea was brought when I desired. Supper over, I went to bed immediately, overpowered by the delicious lassitude that accompanies purely physical weariness. And then the luxury of twelve to thirteen hours’ wholesome sleep !

These absences on the mountains included some vigorous and interesting tramping. On one day it was Hawkshead, Esthwaite Lake, Coniston, Elterwater, and Loughrigg Tarn, — all familiar names to the Wordsworth lover; on another, Rydal and Grasmere, White Stones, The Stake, Silver How, Sour Milk Ghyll, Easdale Tarn, Stickle Tarn, Dungeon Ghyll Force, — a twenty-mile loop with some very rough climbing ; on still another, Kirkstone Pass, Caudale Moor, Red Screes, Brothers’ Water, Patterdale, Ullswater, Helvellyn, and Grasmere, — twenty - five miles at the least. This tramp was spiced with real danger. On the Grisedale Road, a rugged mountain pass, I was surprised by a heavy fall of snow, almost out of a clear sky. The path, at no time too easy to trace, was obliterated within five minutes after the snow began. Instead of seeking for the shelter of a rock and waiting for the squall to pass, as would have been discreet, like poor Lucy Gray I ” wandered up and down,” slumping, wading, slipping, falling, bumping, scraping, until there was hardly a sound spot on my body. A bone might have been broken as easily as not; and had this happened, the chances are I should have starved before assistance came, —

for when I did at last strike the Grasmere Road, after several hours of anxious, painful wandering, it was at a point some miles beyond the junction with the Grisedale Road, at which I should have emerged. My anxiety during this experience was increased by the certain knowledge that it was in this very pass that the young man Charles Gough (the subject of Wordsworth’s Fidelity, just quoted from, as well as of a poem by Scott) lost his life by sliding from a snow-covered rock.

Driving snow changed to pouring rain. It was eight o’clock before I arrived at Mrs. Hyson’s. I begged permission to drink my tea in the kitchen, that night, before the open fire. It was readily granted. Mrs. Hyson had all along been spoiling for a gossip. What she got from me is immaterial. I learned from her that she was a widow with six children, — two at home, and four out in the world, one of the latter a coachman in America. For a living, besides taking tourist lodgers, she did dressmaking. She had once lodged an American lady “ with a lot of cheek.”who had contrived, the Lord knows how, to secure a plate from which Wordsworth had eaten. “ That was all she knew about Wordsworth; though of course he must be great, or people would n’t come over the water to see where he was buried. Some did say as how Bobby Burns was the better poet, and she thought herself as he was ; not as she had a right to pass judgment as had never read Wordsworth’s writings, but she ’d seen the insides of some of his books, and they did n’t fancy her eyes.”Speaking of Burns led her to congratulate herself that none of her offspring had taken to rhyming. “ Poets are that unthrifty, besides, they mostly don’t live to be old. Susie, how old was Shakespeare when he died ? ” appealing to her fifteen-year-old daughter, to display her book-learning. “ There, I told you so !" when Susie had answered. "I misdoubt my man, who was always a-saying rhymes, would n’t a’ died so unseasonable if he ’d kept away from the versebooks. ”

During my stay, the good widow played a neat trick on me, of which I may speak, for I have long ago forgiven it. She secretly drew from my flask a swallow or two of whiskey a day, then poured in an equal amount of water. Detection was very slow in coming, since it was the lack of quality, and not of quantity, that first aroused my suspicion.

It was on one of the tramps from Mrs. Hyson’s that I lit upon the spot about which my finest memories of the lake-land cluster. I was crossing from Little Langdale Valley to Great Langdale Valley, with the Langdale Pikes in my view, when I came to an isolated house, upon the front wall of which “ Ginger Beer, Milk and Lemonade" were advertised. It was a warm day for the season, and I was thirsty ; so I went in and purchased a glass of cool rich milk and some oat cakes, for a penny. There was a beautiful tarn close by the house, and glorious fells were about it. Altogether the spot pleased me so that I begged the inmates to take me as a boarder. They were quite willing to do it, at a price that just suited me,— two shillings a day. I paid them in advance for a week, promising to return Saturday, when my time would be up at Ambleside. Their receipted bill is a curiosity: —

“ s. d. Receved the some of forten 14 0 shillens for one weak Bord and Lodgens at Blea Tarn doo to W. ROBBINS.”

That night I discovered from my Baedeker that I had unwittingly engaged lodgings in the very cottage lived in by the “ Solitary” of Wordsworth’s Excursion. Here is the poet’s description : —

Fourscore years have passed since this was written. There are thickets now suitable for the birds, and beautiful birds to fill them. There are many scattered trees and a young larch plantation. A huge crooked larch guards the house on one side, and a maple on the other. The house is fronted by several walled-in flower-plots, and flanked by a hen-house and a wagon-house. It has a two-story ell of comparatively recent date. The cock is no longer single in his domain.” Shepherd dogs sleep in the sun ; young ducks, with legs set too far back on their bodies, lurch about the yard, and old ducks run out their tongues and hiss like impudent children. But with these few exceptions the quoted lines still hold good.

The room assigned to me was in the upper story of the ell. It was a simple little chamber with a single northwest window, whose sill was wide enough for a window-seat, — unlooked-for blessing! It contained plain bedroom furniture and a fireplace, Its only adornments were a tiny chromo of a shipwreck, a gilt-framed drawing of Christ, and two unframed illuminated Scripture texts : “ Riches and Honour are with me ” (Prov. viii. 18) ; “ Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matt. v. 3), — sentiments befitting the place.

The kitchen, which, with the dairy, took up all the first story of the original house, was eloquent of industry and good cheer. Spick-and-spanness was its most salient characteristic. Scoured brass candlesticks stood on the mantel, shining tin dishes were ranged in rows on the wallracks, pewter mugs hung everywhere. It had bald patriarchal rafters and a huge fireplace in which flames were incessantly busy. The floor was stone.

The face of Mrs. Robbins is as beamy as the tinware on the racks. Mrs. Robbins is the presiding genius of the kitchen. She is also the real head of the household, notwithstanding she calls her husband “ the master.” She is short of stature. Her chin is sharp, her eyes are piercing, her nose is hooked like the beak of a bird of prey; her cheek-bones protrude, and her cheeks are deeply sunken because of her not having had a tooth in her head for sixteen years. She is probably not over fifty, — though a multitude of wrinkles, the lace cap which she ordinarily wears, and the weight of her clogs, added to the premature caving-in of her countenance, make her look at least ten years older. When the lace cap gives place to an old rusty roundcrowned man’s hat, as it does in rainy weather, she is a grotesque figure indeed.

Her favorite phrase, her first response, in fact, to almost every address, is, “ Oh, to be sure! ” and she gives this response with such a variety of emphasis and intonation that it is almost a language in itself. She can express as much with this one phrase as many people with a whole dictionary ; still, she by no means confines herself to it, for she is inordinately fond of talking. Though as busy as the proverbial ant, which she further resembles in slimness of figure, she will stop any where, any when, to talk about any thing. I failed to discover a subject that she was at a loss to make an observation on, and her observations were almost invariably as bright and keen as her eye, for she is a practical philosopher withal. But nothing interests her quite as much as the weather, inasmuch as on it more than on anything else depends the welfare of her farm. It is a lesson in the relativity of things to find the weather a source of real permanent interest, to anybody. By the light of this interest the conventional phrases of small talk are marvelously illuminated. “ Oh, to be sure ! A bonny rain ! Ye can almost ken the grass grow,” she would say, after one of the sudden, severe showers of the district, and you could see in her eye visions of fleecy flocks and successful Ambleside market-days.

Next to the weather in her interest is the dairy. She took me in there one day with the air of bestowing a great privilege, as indeed she was; for it was just such a dairy, in all but size, as George Eliot assigned to Mrs. Poyser. “ It was a scene to sicken for with a sort of calenture in hot and dusty streets, such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of newpressed cheese, of firm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in pure water; such soft coloring of red earthenware and creamy surfaces, brown wood and polished tin, gray limestone, and rich orange-red rust on the iron weights and hooks and hinges.” Mrs. Robbins gets from one shilling to one shilling sevenpence per lump for her butter, according to season, and each lump is supposed to weigh a pound. It really weighs a trifle more, for she keeps a venerable penny on the pound-weight, “ for good measure and good luck,” as her mother and grandmother did before her.

How proud she was to impart to me her bits of house and farm lore: the proper treatment of hens and ducks ; the nursing, weaning, and bringing-up of children and calves; the virtues of shepherd dogs; the advantages of a mountain brook as a refrigerator and a wash-tub. And I confess that I prize these bits more than any knowledge of schools. I remember fondly that a hawthorn hedge is an ideal clothes-line; that in Westmoreland the last butter in the autumn is considered the choicest (not June butter, as with us) ; and that cedar shavings, which may be had for the asking at the Keswick pencil factory, are the very best preventive of moths. I remember still more fondly Mrs. Robbins’s little oddities of speech ; her motherly insistence on warming my bed with bottles ; her cajolery in imposing on me delicious homemade wine, when I came in, heated and fagged, from a tramp ; her regret at my not being able to tarry long enough for the apples and cherries, —“ Oh, to be sure ! I ’m that sorry ! Ye ’ll no be here to pluck ’em; ” her simplicity in thinking people must all go to bed early in the part of America I came from, because we had short twilights; her fluttering anxiety lest some accident befall me on my sea-voyage home. In brief, Mrs. Robbins is one of the dearest of dear motherly women ; beyond that words cannot go in praise.

“ The master ” works out by the day, if work is to be had, and often he has to walk five miles to find it. Then he does not get home until nine o’clock at night, when it is still light in this latitude. If not working out, he tends his own sheep on the fells, or does such farm work as may be urgent. He is a slender, ruddy-faced man, younger in looks and in years than his wife, almost boyish in jollity. When he came in from his work to the big, hearty fire, he used to “ hope ” (with a facetious wink) “that his women folks had behaved while he ‘d been gone, and had n’t given me no sort of trouble, as they sometimes did him.” He was sure to insist on my lifting his enormous clogs as often as he took them off, and never failed to be convulsed with mirth over my display of effort. Unfortunately, a husky utterance made his broad dialect almost jargon to me.

A gayer pair is rarely seen. Their satisfaction in each other, particularly their appreciation of each other’s wit, is almost comical. The glee with which the mistress receives the sallies of the master is as fresh and unfeigned as if they had not been repeated in her hearing a hundred times. Her low chuckle in expectation of a hit, her gasping “Oh, to be sure ! ” when the expected hit is made, are worth going very far to hear. The infinite pains she is at to interpret his jokes to me, because I cannot penetrate the dialect in which they are delivered, are an even higher proof of her admiring devotion. And yet, with all the mirth of their living, this quaint couple are conscious, and, unintentionally, make others conscious, of a never-lifted burden of hard work for a bare subsistence. The dull ache of habitual submission is theirs. Their faces, in repose, express the blank weariness of the faces of Millet’s peasant canvases. The faces of their four children, three daughters and a son, express little else at any time. They seem to have inherited all the gloom of their parents, and none of their sprightliness.

I was disappointed not to take my meals with the family, bat their hours of eating were literally “ too many ” for me, — one breakfast at half after five and another at eight, dinner at half after eleven, supper at four, and tea at half after seven ; so my meals were served to me in my room by the youngest daughter, a shy savage, who earns an occasional penny by opening the gate across the road for passing carriages, and who helps the family out further by gathering armfuls of dry wood high up on the fells. My breakfast came at seven, my dinner at twelve, and my supper at six, except in the event of an all-day tramp ; then I carried a lunch with me for the midday, and had dinner at night. Breakfast consisted of bacon and fried eggs, bread and butter, and a pot of tea; dinner, of bacon or corned beef (fresh beef on market-days) and potato, bread and butter, pudding, cheese, and plenty of milk ; supper, of boiled eggs, bread and butter, marmalade, a Chester cake, and a pot of tea. The tea was always served in gilt-rimmed china, and was supplemented by thick cream. The bread was ready sliced and spread with delicious unsalted butter, — sliced thin and spread thick, according to the good English custom. The cheese was a homemade wonder. The pudding deserves consideration. It was a meal by itself; always served piping hot and brown, in a dish of family size, with a generous pitcher of rich cream for sauce. My mountain appetite made so little ado over an entire pudding that my pudding capacity came to be a standing joke in the family. One only of the pudding series did I fail to sequestrate at a sitting. It was a suet affair, cooked in a bag, not unlike the “ haggis ” celebrated in verse by Burns ; “ our master’s favorite pudding,”Mrs. Robbins confided to me. After such a confidence, I should have been a brute not to leave a portion to be warmed over for the master’s supper. It was early in the season for vegetables, but except in this item and that of fresh meat the menu was all that could be wished. And even bacon does very well, after all, if you are constantly in the open air.

From Blea Tarn, as from Ambleside, I tramped to a distance ; though far less frequently, I was so well content to roam the nearer fells. Two tramps covered from thirty to thirty-five miles each. The first was down from the tarn into Little Langdale Valley; up through Wrynose Pass, where three shire stones mark the meeting of the counties Lancashire, Cumberland, and Westmoreland ; down again into Wrynose Bottom; along the banks of the river of the famous sonnet series, the Duddon, whose water is so clear that pebbles at the bottom of still pools ten to twelve feet deep seem just under the surface, and of so beautiful a green as to suggest the occurrence of crême de menthe in a state of nature; past Seathwaite, distinguished for an immense and ancient yew-tree and a pretty country church, in the yard of which Wonderful Walker is buried; past Dunnerdale Hall and Ulpha Inn ; on and on almost to the sea; then back, past Broughton Mills ; over Walney Scar, whence the sea appears a long shimmering horizon ; through Coniston, Yewdale, Tilberthwaite Glen, and Little Langdale Valley, home.

The second was also over Wrynose Pass to Wrynose Bottom, but there it diverged through Butterilkel into Mitterdale in the valley of the Esk; across to Santon bridge in the valley of the Irt; through Windgate and richly wooded Wastdale to Wastwater, the deepest of the lakes, whose head is inclosed by the highest of the mountains, as well as by those with the hardest lines, the sheerest cliffs, and the blackest shadows ; through the tiny village of Burnthwaite ; up a hard and stony mountain path to Styhead Pass, whence the contrast between the dunness of bare mountains and the fertility of green valleys was most striking, whence too I saw what I did not suppose existed, — something more desolate than a mountain covered with nothing but heather, — a mountain whose heather had just been burned to blackness; on past Styhead Tarn ; up and up into the clouds and show about Sprinkling Tarn ; gradually down past Angle Tarn, a threecornered blotch of ink watched over by Bow Fell ; then quickly down into Oxendale; and finally up Wall End to Blea Tarn.

To live always away from the great centres of human life is dwarfing to a man of any original power. It was so even to Wordsworth, as the product of the last thirty years of his life sorrily testifies. His best work was certainly done while something of the turmoil of the world was still in his soul. Nevertheless, the possible range of a sojourn in a mountain solitude is amazingly large.

Here in the mountains about the tarn I have seen dark and light clouds commingle through the twilight in the strangest fashion, just as I used to see them as a child elsewhere. I had time then to look about me, and there were no brick walls in the way. Here, as there, I have traced the course of a dainty shallop through a glorified island-filled sea; have encouraged white - night - shirted youngsters to perseverance in pillowfights ; have laid wagers on my favorites in fourhorse-chariot races ; have watched with breathless interest the tourneyings of mailed knights before battlemented castles for the favors of brocaded ladies; have sighed over the glister of sheep supernaturally white, tended by impossibly beautiful shepherds and shepherdesses; have shuddered at wild beasts crowding tropical forests as they crowded the fullpage pictures of an old-fashioned school geography, and at boundless open plains haunted by more and worse crawling and hissing things than are mentioned in the whole book of Revelation. A crooked, isolated tree never failed to become, just before the sun dropped, a bent, ragged, and aged beggar leaning on a twisted staff. These fancies are simple, childish pleasures, but no wise one will venture to depreciate them on that account.

Nor will any wise one scorn the athletics of a mountain district,— animal delight in animal movement, all the “ aching joys ” and “ dizzy raptures” of mountain climbing. Untrammeled physical motions may here perfectly express the feelings that elsewhere have to stay unexpressed, or be, at best, imperfectly expressed by a trammeled tongue. There is zest always in complete expression, and zest (who does not know it?) is the one thing needful. The skin steams, the blood boils, the heart throbs, the muscles creak, the head whirls, the throat is parched. One leg will hardly move before the other, because each weighs as much as a leg in a nightmare. But there is no cessation. Up and up and up you strain, just for the godlike sensation of sprawling at last upon the breezy mountain top, deliciously fatigued. And the bit of snow you find there is none the less grateful because it kindles one thirst while it quenches another. You run recklessly to the very bottom of the opposite slope, there to drink from a pellucid brook a draught as potent as a mediæval love-philter, if to a different end; to cool hot cheeks on dark velvety moss ; better still, to strip to the skin, and loll on the trunk of a fallen tree in the atomized spray of a roaring force ; even to plunge for a divine burning-freezing instant into the icy pool at the force’s foot.

Slumping through markless bogs, overclimbing stony heights, and trailing watercourses in total disregard of beaten tracks may result in loss of time and bearings, but it is almost equally sure to result in the discovery of a ghyll or force or beck not down on the ordnance map, and so, in a sense, one’s very own.

I have groveled along a cliff, and strained giddily far over its brim, because the spot was a likely one for a tarn ; and often have I been rewarded by a fragment of primeval chaos, an uncanny pool of black water, a tarn without a name, that almost made me lose my grip for joy. No conventional tourist ever saw or will see it, until the flying-machine becomes a luxurious mode of locomotion.

It is every bit worth while to rise long before light, make yourself a cup of tea, and climb for a sunrise; to run to catch a sunset from the best point of vantage before the glory passes; to delay the bedtime, and stumble through the night over uneven, unfamiliar ground, for the caresses of the moon or the fanning of the night-wind. Bird’s-nesting, hunting, and fishing are kindred worthy resources that need not be described.

Complete antithesis to these joys of energy, but equally fine, are the joys of indolence. It is superb to be so little of a time-slave and so fresh of mind as to take a genuine interest in the gambols of the roly-poly lambs, who look and act for all the world (particularly the blacklegged ones) like youngsters in the first pair of trousers. To be heather-cushioned on a sunny slope, with freedom to gaze at sky or tarn or mountains, to think, to day-dream, to smoke a pipe, to read poetry and romance, to listen, if it be a Sunday, to the distant church-bells (sweet music, because all sound and no summons !), and with equal freedom to forget any or all of these things in snug slumber, is to be an Olympian. Under such conditions, even the

takes on a degree of interest. Many, many days did I pass in similar indolence before an open fire in a deserted mountain forge, about a mile from the tarn, — an uncanny spot that had a mysterious attraction for me.

Of quite another sort is the ravishment that comes from myriad manifestations of color, light, and form in nature. Mountain outlines harden and soften with the changes of the atmosphere. Dripping morning mists brood over the lakes like mother-birds. They curl along the lines of the hedges in shapes as fine, free, and fantastic as those of a cigarette-smoker’s breath. A raincloud clings to a mountain as passionately as Francesca to Paolo, in Dante’s other world, displaying a form almost as fair. A luminous afternoon haze mystifies the landscape as a gauze curtain does a scene on the stage. Clouds are piled together like plucked cotton-bolls in the Southern cotton-fields. Unseen currents draw out cloud masses into finest threads, and make them into films and laces ; it is as if ghostly spiders were weaving their webs, or disembodied Bohemian glass-blowers were plying their trade in the sky. Colored lights, purple and violet, red and orange, pink and salmon, spread momentary unearthly glories over pikes and fells. Brunette clouds coquettishy don pink caps. The face of the heavens blushes at the wooings of the night. Dark blue crags recline on cushions of soft yellow light. Frequent showers span the heavens with frequent rainbows ; rainbows tremble always by the sunlit water-breaks.

Flowers also stir the beauty sense. I came one day on such a gorgeous mass of yellow mountain globe-flowers that my head was turned as completely as another’s might have been by a successful lottery drawing. I fairly tore the yellow beauties up by handfuls, until my arms were overflowing. Then I dropped my plunder under a tree, threw myself down beside it, and wantonly tossed the golden rotundities through a slanting sunbeam, just for the pleasure there was in their shimmer. It was as well that as anything, for them and me. They would surely have perished in my arms before I could have got them home, however tenderly I held them. In this region, any turning in the path may open up the brazen, barbaric, but beautiful spectacle of a stretch of broom or gorse bloom. More soulful, if less splendid, are the violets : and nothing in nature or out of it is finer as a color combination than fresh dewy banks of pale yellow primroses and dark blue violets growing together. The rich color and heavy fragrance of a bed of wild hyacinths, when the birds are whistling love notes above it, and the sun is warm upon it, and the maples and leaving oaks are tender pink and green around it, make one drunk with passion. Other flowers speak tender or startling messages from their homes of moss, or sod, or fern : cowslips, daisies, wild geraniums, saucy buttercups, flaky anemones, white strawberry blooms, tiny yellow trefoils, starlike stitchworts, bird’s - eye veronicas, lesser celandines, lilylike but noisome wild garlics, delicate lavender-robed cuckoo-flowers.

The sounds are hardly less seductive, and in these the birds play the largest part. Bustling blackbirds bicker about the ash - trees : starlings flirt vocally among the elms ; swallows twitter from the eaves and chimneys ; skylarks trill in the face of the sun ; hedge sparrows and bulfinches vie in arias : green linnets exult among the hazel leaves ; thrushes render intimate soul-music : turtle-doves coo ventriloquently ; venerable rooks caw gravely ; cuckoos gurgle mysteriously. Then there are the tinkling of the little brooks, the trumpeting of the forces, the reverberation of the thunder, the whistle and roar and sough of the winds, the patter of the raindrops on the leaves, the call of the shepherds, the barking of the shepherd dogs, the hoarse baaing of the sheep and the plaintive bleating of the lambs, and the manifold eloquence of the mountains after a shower, when fountains of rich sound gush from a thousand unsuspected mouths. This mountain and sky environment is extraordinarily friendly to the sober pleasure of contemplation. Natural symbolism is helpful, like church symbolism, while the one has no more binding force than the other. Without insisting, then, that the analogies nature has always impelled men to draw are infallible, or indeed possess any authority whatever, the fact remains that the drawing is inevitable, and that there is a very real pleasure in it.

For instance, it is impossible, when height after height is attained only to reveal another higher up and farther on, not to ponder the deceptiveness of ideals ; or, when the outlook from a mountain’s summit turns out to be far less entrancing than from its slope, not to realize that sheer ignorance impels us to renounce the best the world can give us, — to struggle for something that, when it is got, is less fine than the best ; or, when a tarn, ordinarily saturnine and reticent, is made to break into millions of shifting sparkles and great moving patches of white light by a stiff breeze from a certain quarter, not to recall how still, dark, inert men have become oriflammes under the sweep of a great crisis ; or, when a gold cloud loses its gold by being driven out of the reach of the sun, not to remember the souls that have forever lost their glow from the withdrawal of the luminous rays of love; or, when peering and peering into the depths of the sky reveals nothing, not to wonder at the hopeless folly of men in trying to pierce the mystery of life.

Stumbling over a dead lamb in a lonely spot on the mountains is like stumbling over a dead hope. Black tragedies and gray commonplaces are as useful foils in life as black and gray clouds in a sunset. A white path that seems to lead off and up into a higher, finer world begins to descend just when it appears most ascendant. The flickering play of light and shade among the pikes and vales is as fitful as the movement of joy and sorrow through the world. The straining of mighty mountains through æons, with nothing to show for it but rocks and stunted growths, pathetically symbolizes the petty issues of the great ambitions of great minds. The calm and smiling cruelties of nature suggest at once the inevitableness and the irony of fate.

If I may be pardoned for speaking of so intimate a thing, here in the mountains, if anywhere, are the consolations of religion. Here, if anywhere, the throb of universal joy is felt, and that is God. Here, if anywhere, the pang of universal pain is felt, and that is God. Here, if anywhere, the gripe of universal law is felt, and that is God. Here, if anywhere, the radiance of universal charm is felt, and that is God. Here, if anywhere, the broil of universal strife is felt, and that is God. Here, if anywhere, is peace that passeth knowledge; that too, in very truth, is God. Here, if anywhere, may be had, momentarily at least, the consciousness of the relation that always exists, though oftenest obscured, between the soul of man and the soul of all things ; and this consciousness is communion, if anything is. Feeling and sharing the pain and the joy, the travail and the peace, the relentlessness and beauty of the Spirit of the Universe brings illuminating moments. In them we are for the nonce

The time came at last to resume my journey. With very real regret I said good-by to kind Mrs. Robbins and her family, and at just four o’clock in the afternoon I had my last view from Esk Hause of the tarn and the Solitary’s cottage. Then I renewed my acquaintance with Styhead Pass, whence I made the comparatively easy descent, with Great Gable on the left and Glaramara on the right, into Borrowdale, the valley through which the river Derwent flows to Derwentwater. Near the bottom was Seathwaite Force, standing out in exquisite relief against a tender green larch plantation ; and a little farther on, Taylor’s Ghyll Force was turning an immense gaunt water-wheel. In Seathwaite village, to which I came about six o’clock, was a spruce-looking house advertising “ Beds and Refreshment,” at which I should have done well to put up for the night. But I did not then feel the need of either bed or refreshment. So I rashly held on without halting through that and the next village, Seatoller. When, at last, I was both tired and hungry, not a house was to be seen. There was a sheepfold, though, half buried in a clump of trees, on the farther bank of the Derwent. I crossed a foot-bridge, and made an examination of the interior. The earth floor was bare and damp, but there was a loft on one side, covered with bracken that tempted my weary limbs. It promised well for a bed, and my pack would make the best sort of a pillow. I was hungry, to be sure, but I was more tired than hungry. So I climbed the loft, dug my feet as far as possible into the bracken, and went to sleep amid the ravishing lullabies of the birds wbo were still singing in the trees outside.

About ten o’clock I awoke in the dark, very cold and very hungry. My head was aching like mad. I drew out my whiskey flask, but it was empty, — criminal carelessness that deserved punishment and got it. A few miserable naps were all that came to me, and at the first trace of dawn I made my way down and out. Moving produced a dreadful nausea, and I lay for several minutes in the wet grass just outside the door, too faint to lift my head. As soon as I was able to stir, I crawled northward (it could not be called walking), passing a number of houses. Unfortunately, it was Sunday morning, and nobody was up. The exertion warmed me a little, but relieved neither the headache nor the nausea, and about five o’clock I was fain to stagger into an open barn abutting on the road. Too listless even to protect myself from the cold with a layer of bracken, I slept two hours. Then I started on again, sufficiently relieved to notice the rich beauties of Derwentwater, on whose west shore I was. I had learned my lesson : not that it is foolish to sleep in barns and folds, — I have often done it since with most gratifying results,—but that it is foolish to go to bed without supper, without sufficient covering, above all without whiskey in the flask. The lullabies of the birds about the fold had been almost worth the misery, but it was inexpressibly humiliating to think that I might have had the music minus the misery for only so much forethought as is represented by a large swallow of liquor.

The first person I saw, that morning, was a girl with a milk - pail emerging from a barn. My stomach not being yet bold enough for milk, I asked her, politely enough, if she could get me a cup of hot water. The hot-water fad had not then struck the Lake District, and the poor thing took me for a madman. Ejaculating a husky “ No, I don’t think I could. We don’t sell it,” she disappeared, with a frightened face. Had I asked for tea instead of water, she would have comprehended readily enough, and treated me quite differently. At the next house I knocked timidly. The people were just getting up. I was ordered to wait by a nondescript head in a chamber window, and after a little was admitted by a half-dressed man. The man lita fire, whose warmth was very grateful. The “ women folks ” would soon be down, and we would all have breakfast together. The “ women folks “ proved to be a wife and grown-up daughter : both were tall, slim, blonde, red-haired, and talkative. Within fifteen minutes from my knock at the door I was enjoying a family breakfast of tea, toast, and eggs. It cost me ninepence; but a shilling’s worth of medicine could not have made me over so speedily. On the strength of it, I walked nearly thirty miles that Sunday, up and down the shores of beautiful Derwentwater, over a mountain pass to Honister Crag, northwesterly along the shores of the lakes, Buttermere and Crummock, into Lorton Vale, and on to Cockermouth, Wordsworth’s birthplace, and the northwestern gateway of the Lake District. On the shore of Crummock I was regaled at a prosperous farmhouse with oat cake and three glasses of milk, for which I was allowed to pay only a penny ; but, thrown off my guard by such generosity, at Lorton I was forced to pay a shilling for a lunch of bread and cheese and milk that should not have been more than threepence. At Cockermouth I got a meat pie and some ale for fourpence, thus bringing the cost of my food for the day up to two shillings twopence, one shilling twopence in excess of my allowance for food. But as supper and lodging had cost me nothing the night before, the two - shillings - perday limit had not really been exceeded. At the Brown Cow I secured a bed for a shilling, though it involved more haggling to get it at that price than I should have had courage for, had not the memory of the Lorton swindle been rankling in my soul.

That night being my last in the Wordsworth Country, I naturally fell into a reminiscent mood. With the single exception of the night when I had made a fool of myself. I had had a comfortable place to sleep in and plenty of wholesome food. I had come to appreciate more keenly the great qualities of a great poet ; to know with a new knowledge, and to love with a new love, flowers and birds, skies and waters and mountains; to feel color, form, and chiaroscuro more intensely, and to value at their real worth the splendid human qualities of plain people. I had also been face to face with God. I had received bodily refreshment, mental stimulus, and Spiritual help.

And all for an outlay of a paltry fourteen shillings a week ! It was a good investment. It seemed so to me then ; it seems so to me now. All travelers may not be as fortunate in their hosts as I was, but everywhere in the Lake District lodgings are wholesome, prices cheap, and people cordial. Any man who has held through thick and thin his childishness, his boyishness, his love of people, his love of beauty, and his sense of reverence will find it one of the best sections of Great Britain for leisurely, economical travel. Nervousness, hustling, dissipation, faddism, pedantry, are not of it. Quiet and simplicity and sincerity and sanity are of it, and of these are worn-out lives made new.

Alvan F. Sanborn.