Under the lee of a wood of bronzed beeches we made a stick fire to warm the stew-pot, while the smith replaced the shoe amid an interested group of yokels who had popped up from goodness knows where.
The wonderfully transparent atmosphere of this region appears to possess magnifying powers, for even the poultry on the distant knolls assume the forms of huge birds, and as for the gaunt lady who sat “taking the air” on a lonesome bench half a mile away, she would have passed right enough for the wife of Goliath, if that celebrity ever possessed a missis.
In a locality like this, romance and poetry meet one at every turn. A commonplace duck-pond in a grassy hollow does not, perhaps, suggest the glamorous things of life; yet the small tarn lying before us in the sunshine is the subject of a curious local legend. Here, says tradition, you are treading upon fairy ground, for in this dimple in front of the beech wood you have a bottomless pool!
As for yon grey house amid the trees on the common’s upper edge, well, the man for whom it was built lived in it but a day and died, and over the doorway somebody has inscribed the text, “Occupy till I come.”
Soon after quitting the common, Wild Boar Fell begins to mark the skyline on our right, and now all around us lies a realm of strewn rocks—
“Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurled,
The fragments of an earlier world.”
A stiff push up the inclines brought us at last to the high point from whence the road dipped into the long straggling town of Kirkby-Stephen. Verily the place seemed to have dropped asleep in the September sun. With as little delay as possible we held on our way until, by 5 p.m., we had made Warcop and had pitched behind the farmhouse where we had stayed on previous happy occasions.
With all hands to work, the tent was put up in record time, and as the ruddy sundown tinged the tree boles near our camp, we gathered round the fire for the evening meal. Thus closed a superb summerlike day.
September 29.—Somewhere about 7 a.m. a whiff of tobacco smoke comes curling pleasantly round the edge of our bunk in the tilt-cart, and I become aware that my bedmate, Fred o’ the Bawro Gav, is dressing. “There’s a heavy dew this morning,” says he, turning back the coverings at the entrance of the cart; and in a little while I am up and washing outside, and perceive for myself that the cobwebs on the hedge are delicately jewelled with drops of dew. “Look at the calves,” says Fred, “pretty fellows, aren’t they?” My companion has quite a farmer’s eye for things, and as a weather-prophet he rarely makes a mistake. Overhead low clouds are rolling, or rather masses of dove-coloured mist, with patches of blue sky showing between, and already the mountains rising to the north are richly bathed in sunshine.