and mossy homesteads, planted irregularly above the beck at any time within the last five centuries. Fine old trees of sycamore, ash, and oak spread a protecting mantle of foliage over this snug and ancient haunt of dalesmen—a little patch of leafy opulence between the stern walls of fell that rise sharply on either hand. One or two houses of the group, representing, one might fancy, the proportionate decline of population in the dales, are falling or have long ago fallen into ruins. Moss and ferns, stone-crop and saxifrage, have seized alike upon both the abandoned and the fallen, upon the sagging flagstone roof which covers neither more nor less of the exposed weather-stained oak rafters than it did ten years ago, upon the fallen stones of a more completed ruin slowly sinking into the ground. Here may be seen, too, the deep, oldfashioned spinning galleries thrust out from the upper story and covered by an extension of the roof, invaluable not merely for the summer air, but for the lack of winter daylight in those massive, low-browed, small-windowed fortresses where the thrifty dalesmen dwelt. Wordsworth has celebrated a pretty old tradition that the spindles ran truer after the sheep had mounted the hill for their night's rest.

Now beneath the starry sky
Crouch the widely scattered sheep,
Ply the pleasant labour, ply,
For the spindle while they sleep
Runs with motion smooth and fine,
Gathering up a trustier line.

A mile or so up the glen, the higher part a steep climb, down which a beck comes leaping in successive cataracts over black rocks feathered with fern and rowan trees, lies entrenched between mountain walls which rise some fifteen hundred feet above its three sides, the lonely lake of Hayswater. Scarce a mile in length and narrow in proportion, the scene is one in fair weather of delightful and impressive solitude, in wild weather awesome to a degree bordering on the uncanny. The mountain ridges all round are grey, stern, and rugged, while their green, rock-strewn lower slopes fall for the most part sharply to the water's edge. There is nowhere even a suggestion of humanity, but a rude boat half full of water chained to a rock. So lonely a sheet of water of this size, and thus nobly encompassed about and shut off from the world, there is not in all Lakeland. On a tempestuous May day some two years since the writer, underrating the measure of ferocity that the extra elevation of a thousand feet adds to a storm, found himself a solitary angler, beside these gloomy shores, amid as fine a prospect of the kind as the somberer side of one's soul might wish for. The south-west gale had found its way over the screes of the High Street ridge that closes the head of the narrow valley of which Kidsty and Grey Crag form the sides. Enraged apparently by opposition, it was coming down the full length of the lake in intermittent bursts of rain-laden fury that made even keeping one's feet no simple matter, and life altogether for the moment a moderate sort of entertainment. The fact that in the brief pauses, while the storm drew fresh breath, I could just keep my flies on the water in the shelter of rocky points, and at the same time not unprofitably, must be quoted in explanation of what might otherwise seem a quite superfluous attendance at such a dismal pandemonium of the elements. But these fortuitous encounters with nature in her most savage mood, and in her grimmest haunts, are among the memories that for myself I would ill spare, and none the less so because they so often belong to the unexpected and the unsought.

KIRKSTONE PASS AND BROTHERS WATER

The upper and more rugged half of the valley walls on this sombre occasion opened and shut in veils of scudding mist, while their steep green flanks, littered with black crags fallen in long ages past from above, made a fitting frame for the white hissing waters that filled the long and stormy trough. But the crowning feature of this particular scene was at the foot of the lake, where it draws to a narrow point between high rocky banks, and the out-going beck leaps towards the gorge below through a gap in a stone dyke which otherwise closes the entrance. For into this funnel the storm seemed to concentrate its fury, lashing the waters after the fashion of a helm wind high into the air, and hurling them far down into the ravine below.

But I do not wish to keep the reader out in the wind and rain for the whole of our sojourn in Patterdale, and I should be an ingrate indeed to do so, for in many visits to this delightful haven in the Lake country I am only too rejoiced to remember that sunshine has far outbalanced cloud. And under such conditions the three miles of verdant vale from Hartsop to Ullswater, by way of the hamlet and church of Patterdale (named from St. Patrick) to Glenridding on the lake shore, is as characteristic and charming a pastoral valley as there is in all the Lake country. Cottages and homesteads, with their sheltering tufts of foliage, have still even this much-visited country almost to themselves, as they had it a century ago. The Goldrill, now a lusty stream, curves and sparkles from farm to farm. The bordering fields terminate in pleasant strips of woodland, or in bosky knolls of fern and rock, while far above upon either side rise steep and high the everlasting hills. And crowding round the head of Ullswater, which now spreads wide its bright island-studded waters and ends the vale, are mountains piled up everywhere. Place Fell and Birk Fell, lifting their untamed steeps of crag and scree sheer up from the water along four miles of the eastern shore, give that exceptional touch of wildness to the great lake which, together with the fine grouping of Helvellyn and her satellites upon the other side, justifies in the opinion of many its claim to pre-eminence among its sisters. For myself, I frankly admit that the head of Ullswater, and, for choice, a lodgment upon the Glenridding shore near the edge of the lake, holds me more tenaciously when I get there than any part of Lakeland.

There was once a king in Patterdale. His name was Mounsey, and he died in 1792, and the Gentleman's Magazine for that year in its obituary tells us all about him, facts confirmed, if such were necessary, by local tradition. This was in the days of the "statesmen", before outsiders came in and bought property and broke in upon the old Lakeland democracy. Patterdale Hall has now this long time been a large country house with a large estate attached to it. In the modest original homestead, however, reigned the Mounseys, who from time immemorial had been regarded as "kings" of the dale before the reign of the undesirable and eccentric monarch who proved to be the last but one of them.

This John Mounsey had an income of ₤800 a year, and the chief efforts of his life, which lasted over ninety years, were directed to keeping his expenses down to £30. In short, he was a miser of the most unabashed type. He was endowed with immense physical strength, of which, unlike his money, he grudged no expenditure in the pursuit of the over-mastering passion of his life. He rowed his own slate and timber down the lake to market, and toiled all day at the hardest manual tasks. When compelled to visit Penrith or elsewhere on business, he slept in neighbouring barns to save a hotel bill. He had his stockings shod with leather, and always wore