But the corroboration comes in strange guise. Mr. Rawnsley asked one of the Dalesmen about Wordsworth’s dress and habits. This was the reply: ‘Wudsworth wore a Jem Crow, never seed him in a boxer in my life,—a Jem Crow and an old blue cloak was his rig, and _as for his habits_, _he had noan_; niver knew him with a pot i’ his hand, or a pipe i’ his mouth. But he was a greät skater, for a’ that—noan better in these parts—why, he could cut his own naäme upo’ the ice, could Mr. Wudsworth.’ Skating seems to have been Wordsworth’s one form of amusement. He was ‘over feckless i’ his hands’—could not drive or ride—‘not a bit of fish in him,’ and ‘nowt of a mountaineer.’ But he could skate. The rapture of the time when, as a boy, on Esthwaite’s frozen lake, he had wheeled about, Proud and exulting like an untired horse That cares not for his home, and, shod with steel, Had hissed along the polished ice, was continued, Mr. Rawnsley tells us, into manhood’s later day; and Mr. Rawnsley found many proofs that the skill the poet had gained, when Not seldom from the uproar he retired, Into a silent bay, or sportively Glanced sideways, leaving the tumultuous throng To cut across the reflex of a star, was of such a kind as to astonish the natives among whom he dwelt. The recollection of a fall he once had, when his skate caught on a stone, still lingers in the district. A boy had been sent to sweep the snow from the White Moss Tarn for him. ‘Did Mr. Wudsworth gie ye owt?’ he was asked, when he returned from his labour. ‘Na, but I seed him tumlle, though!’ was the answer. ‘He was a ter’ble girt skater, was Wudsworth now,’ says one of Mr. Rawnsley’s informants; ‘he would put one hand i’ his breast (he wore a frill shirt i’ them days), and t’ other hand i’ his waistband, same as shepherds does to keep their hands warm, and he would stand up straight and sway and swing away grandly.’