The third and fourth lines were written by the poet's wife, and they show that she was not a poet's wife in vain. It must have been in his "vacant mood" that he rested and wrote, on the bridge at Brothers Water. "I saw Wordsworth often when I was a child," said Frank Marshall[18] [who had joined us at Penrith]; "he used to come to my father's house, Patterdale Hall, and once I was sent to the garden by Mrs. Wordsworth to call him to supper. He was musing there, I suppose. He had a long, horse-like face. I don't think I liked him. I said, 'Your wife wants you.' He looked down at me and he answered, 'My boy, you should say Mrs. Wordsworth, and not "your wife."' I looked up at him and I replied, 'She _is_ your wife, isn't she?' Whereupon he said no more. I don't think he liked me either." We were going up Kirkstone Pass when Marshall told this story,--which seemed to bring the pensive and homely poet plainly before us. An hour later, at the top of the pass, while waiting in the old inn called the Traveller's Rest, which incorrectly proclaims itself the highest inhabited house in England,[19] I spoke with an ancient, weather-beaten hostler, not wholly unfamiliar with the medicinal virtue of ardent spirits, and asked for his opinion of the great lake poet. "Well," he said, "people are always talking about Wordsworth, but I don't see much in it. I've read it, but I don't care for it. It's dry stuff--it don't chime." Truly there are all sorts of views, just as there are all sorts of people. [Illustration: _William Wordsworth._] Mementos of Wordsworth are frequently encountered by the traveller among these lakes and fells. One of them, situated at the foot of Place Fell, is a rustic cottage that the poet once selected for his residence: it was purchased for him by Lord Lonsdale, as a partial indemnity for losses caused by an ancestor of his to Wordsworth's father. The poet liked the place, but he never lived there. The house somewhat resembles the Shakespeare cottage at Stratford,--the living-room being floored with stone slabs, irregular in size and shape and mostly broken by hard use. In a corner of the kitchen stands a fine carved oak cupboard, dark with age, inscribed with the date of the Merry Monarch, 1660. [Illustration: _Approach to Ambleside._]