CASTLE NICK MILE-CASTLE, WITH CRAG LOUGH IN THE DISTANCE
I was coming this way once with my sketching-things at six o'clock in the morning, and I though I would go down the Stairs, and get a view of the Wall from the plains. My things were heavy, so I left them at the top, just where a stone boundary wall crosses the Wall. Having seen enough, I was returning, when I heard a noise. Surely some very large Cat was coming down the stairs! Stones were bounding from rock to rock and falling on the plain. I waited, and there swung into view a tall young shepherd with my sketching-things hung round his neck! It was amusing to see his astonishment and confusion. But I knew at once what had happened without his needing to explain. He thought my things had been forgotten the day before by some member of a party who had visited the Wall, for he said he had never before seen any one about there so early. I thanked him for his kind intentions, and asked him to add to his kindness by taking the things "upstairs" again. Which he did, and I went on my way.
And here I must interrupt the Walk for a little while to speak of life at the lonely farms, where they so kindly took me in. Nearly always they said, "No," at first. If they gave no reason, or an incontrovertible one, I went away. If they said, "We can't get meat for oorsel's, and we're fair stoured wi' rabbits," I saw my chance, and protested that I wanted no meat at all, only eggs and bread and butter and milk. Then they usually yielded at once, with a "Well, ye sanna go hungert!"
The middle of May is the annual moving-time for the farms, I found; so it is a bad time to try to get taken in.
Once they had hardly got straight after a move when I called, and the good-wife said doubtfully, "Would ye mind a fixt bed?"
"Oh dear, no," I said gaily, not having the faintest idea what it was! But I thought it must be better than a peripatetic one! When the time came, my bed looked very ordinary indeed, and I was quite disappointed. I made inquiries, and the housewife smiled, and said her extra bed had come by the carrier unexpectedly soon. "But ye can see the fixt bed if ye like." I found it was a two-legged wooden bedstead forming part of the structure of a small attic, with the back built against the wall, and the two legs at the foot immovably glued to the floor. Rather nice, when one moves in to a new house, to find one bed already there!
At these "out-by" farms they keep very early hours; they often have dinner at 10.30, tea at 2.30, supper at 5.30, and go to bed at 7.30.
Sometimes I would spend a day out with the children on the moors, or mosses, as they are usually called, where in places the draining-ditches are so close together that progress is a perpetual jump. Or if there are no ditches, it means jumping from one clump of rushes to the next. But "nae rash-bush e'er deceived true Scot," as the proverb says, and the rush-bushes never let us down, Scots though we were not.
There I saw cranberry-blossom for the first time; and any amount of milk-wort, all colours, and butter-wort, and the sticky round-leaved sundew.