a rocky bed, and now, in gentle and harmonious hum, vying with the breeze as it comes sighing down the valley. Central between the Waters, and nestling in its mountains, lies the little village of Buttermere, like a babe in its mother’s lap. Scarce half-a-dozen houses, huddled together like sheep for mutual shelter from the storm, make up the humble mountain home. On each side, in straggling order, perched up in the hill-side nooks, the other dwellings group themselves about it. In the centre stands the unpretending village inn. Behind it stretched the rich, smooth, and velvety meadows, spotted with red cattle, and looking doubly green and soft and level, from the rugged, brown, and barren mountains, that rise abrupt upon them. To stand in these fields, separating as they do the twin waters, is, as it were, to plant the foot upon the solid lake, and seem to float upon some verdant raft. High on the rock, fronting the humble inn, stands sideways the little church, smaller than the smallest cottage, with its two bells in tiny belfry crowning its gable end, and backed by the distant mountain that shows through the opening pass made by the hill on whose foot it rests. Round and about it circles the road, in its descent towards the homesteads that are grey with the stone, and their roofs green with the slate of their native hills, harmonious in every tint and shade with all around them. Beside the bridge spanning the angry nook which hurries brawling round the blocks of stone that intercept its course, stands the other and still more humble inn, half clad in ivy, and hiding the black arch through which the mountain “beck,” white with foam, comes dashing round the turn.