And first of all, he found that he might regard this hamlet of Wadsworth either as barbarous or civilised, and be, in a sense, right either way. It was rougher by several degrees than Horwick Town, where the Thursday cloth-market was held--the town where he had left the grey galloway; on the other hand, its manners passed as gentle and gracious by comparison with certain places away over the well-nigh impassable Scout--Holdsworth, Booth, Brotherton, Fluett, and other nooks lost in the wilds that stretched a dozen miles and more to Trawden Forest in Lancashire. This westerly district went by the name of Back o’ the Moon, or, as they had it, “Back o’ th’ Mooin” (for they put the “i” into that and similar words--the “Goose,” the Wadsworth inn, was invariably the “Gooise,” and there was scarce a long open vowel but they made a diphthong of it). This mountainous and inaccessible country was cut up into innumerable short deep valleys and Slacks, thinly-wooded Deans, stony Shelves, leagues of sweeping heather, and rocks, and Scouts and Ridges past counting. The best part of a winter might pass and a Holdsworth man would not be seen in Brotherton nor a Brotherton man in Booth; while Fluett, save for the Pack Causeway that, creeping by a roundabout route out of Horwick, gained the high land and crossed the whole district, would have been utterly isolated. One geographical fact especially impressed the parson: that was, that the nature of the country had determined the passing of special Acts of Parliament for the protection of the weavers of Back o’ th’ Mooin. A man could not, up and down such a country, carry on his back more than three or four stone of cloth. He was thus under certain disabilities as compared with those in the valleys; and it had been necessary to limit by enactment the buying-powers of the Horwick merchants, in order that the occupation of the three-and four-stone men should not be entirely gone. Now the parson was a man of his eyes and ears, and of his tongue withal; and of one of the earliest of his observations of Back o’ th’ Mooin he had, by a witty stroke, made a sort of parable. It was a common saying that in Wadsworth they were “All Raikeses--th’ Eastwoods an’ all,” just as in Holdsworth they were all Bentleys, including the Murgatroyds, and in Brotherton Benns, not excepting the Deans. Now it happened that a Murgatroyd of Holdsworth was famous for a certain run of fighting-dogs of extraordinary tenacity, and this man (_his_ nickname, by the way, was “Mish”) hung about Wadsworth a good deal during the summer months--after a hoyden of a girl, it was said, one of the innumerable Raikeses. He had turned up one afternoon with one of his dogs in a leash, that it might not brawl with the tag-rag of Wadsworth, and a little group of men in the square were now jesting with him about the girl and now discussing the dog.