It is no wonder that a yeoman farmer's son who could thus write, should have felt irresistibly drawn from exile in Manchester to his native vale, and we find him back at the Yews, in correspondence, now with the editor of a county paper, now with Miss Wordsworth, now writing a ballad or a poem, now a natural history note, now wandering off down Duddon Vale, and through the Lake District, and now keenly interested in a little dilapidated estate in the Crosthwaite township called sometimes Borderside, sometimes Balderside, or perhaps more accurately in Viking phrase, Bauta-side, and determining to go into the farming line. He became purchaser of the Borderside estate in 1822; at once he determined to let it for five years, and gave his whole time and the rent to boot, to the improvement of it. In the summer of the same year that he became an estatesman, he planned a tour into Scotland. Wordsworth wrote him a full and {132} particular itinerary, and William Pearson followed the footsteps of the bard, and really made the same journey as Wordsworth's first excursion to Scotland. There is an interesting note of the peasants recollection of Burns in Ayrshire, and of the Sabbath manners of certain of the Auchterarder folk, but the journal otherwise is a little tiresome. The next ten years were spent in the not very profitable work of mending the fences and outbuildings of Borderside, and then of attempting to make its crops pay the rent and leave something over. But in 1841 he 'declined' farming, not without the secret joy of getting back to his mother's house at the Yews, where all his books were stored, and where the _Encyclopædia_, just bound, was awaiting him. He had not been idle, he had made the Corn Laws a study, and had concluded that they were unjust, cruel, and impolitic. He had done what he could to get the Kendal folk to abolish the old system of selling fruit by baskets, or paniers containing sixteen quarts, and had introduced the better system of selling by weight. In the spring of 1842 his mother died, and {133} now, at the age of sixty-two, William Pearson felt free to marry. He married Ann Greenhow of Heversham in May. He was by instinct a tiller of the ground; he used to say that 'no one felt more dependence upon God than the farmer in his fields.' He turned his attention to fruit culture, planted a large orchard with 300 trees and two lesser ones, and felt that he had not lived in vain. It was during this period that he began making notes of the habits of the bird and beast life round about him. Some observations on the habits of the hedgehog which he sent in 1836 to Mr. Wordsworth were sent by the poet to the members of the Kendal Natural History Society, of which Pearson had been a member almost from the first.