William Pearson was born at the Yews in the Winster Vale on the 9th of October, 1780. His father, who died at the age of 81 in the year 1840, was long remembered as a quiet, studious farmer, who would ever read a book at his meals, and made a practice of going afield at nights to gaze upon the heavens. The stars in their courses helped him to reverence and to thought. William's mother--a Little from the Borderland--survived her husband and died at the age of 88 in 1842. While she span at her flax-wheel she used to delight her little son William with folklore stories and fairy tales, but she was chiefly remembered in the village for her bright activity and energy to the last. Many a time, when she was between seventy and eighty years old, on market day morning, though the horse stood saddled at the door, the old lady would say, 'Nay, hang it, I'll never fash wid it,' and would set off on foot to Kendal, with her butter basket containing twenty to thirty pounds of butter, a distance {119} of six miles and a half, and after 'standing the market' and shopping, would walk home again with her purchases. As a youngster, William's education was left to the wild beauty of his native vale. If ever there was a boy of whom Nature might have said: 'Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse: and with me The _Boy_, in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain,' it was the boy who went afield with his father as soon as he could toddle, and who in Nature's kindly school got to know by heart and eye the hills and scars of the neighbourhood, the tarns and moorlands, the trotting brooks, the rivers running to the sea, the great estuary and marsh, with all their bird and beast and flower life. He never forgot his first sight of Windermere and Morecambe Bay, nor his first journey up Troutbeck over the Kirkstone Pass; and no sooner had he left home for work elsewhere than he felt that there was only one place on this earth where life was worth living and that was the Winster Vale. {120}