The attractive Derwent flows down through the Borrowdale Valley past Seathwaite, where for many a year there has been worked a famous mine of plumbago: we use it for lead-pencils, but our English ancestors, while making it valuable for marking their sheep, prized it still more highly as a remedy for colic and other human ills. There are several pencil-mills in the village, which, in addition to other claims for fame, is noted as one of the rainiest spots in England, the annual rainfall at Seathwaite sometimes reaching one hundred and eighty-two inches. The Derwent flows on through a gorge past the isolated pyramidal rock known as Castle Crag, and the famous Bowder Stone, which has fallen into the gorge from the crags above, to the hamlet of Grange, where a picturesque bridge spans the little river. We are told that the inhabitants once built a wall across the narrowest part of this valley: having long noticed the coincident appearance of spring and the cuckoo, they rashly concluded that the latter was the cause of the former, and that if they could only retain the bird their pleasant valley would enjoy perpetual spring; they built the wall as spring lengthened into summer, and with the autumn came the crisis. The wall had risen to a considerable height when the cuckoo with the approach of colder weather was sounding its somewhat asthmatic notes as it moved from tree to tree down the valley; it neared the wall, and as the population held their breath it suddenly flew over, and carried the spring away with it down the Derwent. Judge of the popular disgust when the sages of that region complainingly remarked that, having crossed but a few inches above the topmost stones of the wall, if the builders had only carried it a course or two higher the cuckoo might have been kept at home, and their valley thus have enjoyed a perennial spring. The Derwent flows on along its gorge, which has been slowly ground out by a glacier in past ages, and enters the lake through the marshy, flat, reedy delta that rather detracts from the appearance of its upper end. Not far away a small waterfall comes tumbling over the crags among the foliage; this miniature Niagara has a fame almost as great as the mighty cataract of the New World, for it is the "Fall of Lodore," about which, in answer to his little boy's question, "How does the water come down at Lodore?" Southey wrote his well-known poem that is such a triumph of versification, and from which this is a quotation: "Flying and flinging, writhing and wringing, Eddying and whisking, spouting and frisking, Turning and twisting Around and around, with endless rebound, Smiting and fighting, a sight to delight in, Confounding, astounding. Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound; All at once, and all o'er, with mighty uproar-- And this way the water conies down at Lodore."