And thus they died.
EPILOGUE
In the kirk-garth of High Fold, among the mouldering head-stones, there lies, half hidden by the matted grasses, a fallen pillar.
It is hewn out of native granite, polished to so fine a grain that even yet it looks like a piece of marble. But it has lain there for many years, and will continue to lie, unless some kindly soul, knowing its history, sets it again upon its pedestal, to defy the storms of that wild region.
The church is rarely used now, for the village has sunk into ruins. Among the roofless cottages the stonechats may be seen flitting in and out all through the long spring and summer days, and they build their nests in the whin-bushes that grow in the old house-places. The sheep come there to crop the grass, for it has a greener tinge, and tastes sweeter than that but a few steps away on the fellside; and a great grey mountain fox once made its home in a chimney. But the Brownriggs, the Yewdales, the Idles, the Flemings—those worthy families who had lived there for many grandfathers back, as they used to say, are all gone from the old homesteads, allured by that will-o'-the-wisp which shines so brightly and persistently in the streets of our great cities, and yet rarely brings the traveller to anything better than the peat-pots, and marsh mosses of Quaking Hag.
The change had come quickly, within two generations. It came with the power loom and the whirling of wheels, with the dying down of the old industries, and the introduction of the new, which screamed out, like a mad midwife, that they were bringing in the Golden Age.
Forty years ago, smoke could still be seen issuing from the chimneys of High Fold. The old folk left behind, used to meet at the well of a summer's morning, and gossip about the days gone by. At that time the pillar was still standing in the kirk-garth—a tall, finely-formed column resting upon a Greek pedestal, but broken off roughly across the top to show that it commemorated a life untimely ended. Travellers rarely came that way, but those who did would stop to read the words engraved upon it, and enquire further about Barbara Lynn, and ask who Peter and Lucy Fleming were, that had raised the monument to her memory.
Now moss, and the action of the weather, have partly obliterated the lettering, yet a careful hand and a sharp eye may still lay it bare. Kneeling on the grass beside it you can read this inscription:
"Barbara Lynn died with her great-grandmother at the fall of Mickle Crags in Boar Dale. Their bodies lie buried in the Great Barrow erected over them by Nature; their souls are free and immortal."