the cows, "we wish to be like our neighbours." "But have you got the real Need Fire?" "Yes, we believe so, it came down Crook yesterday." Now I had heard that it had been at Low Levens a few days before, so that this superstitious fire was evidently moving about in all directions through the length and breadth of the land: nor do they appear to give it any rest, even on Sundays!' {150} JOSEPH HAWELL, A SKIDDAW SHEPHERD. Did you know Joseph Hawell of Lonscale? Nearly everybody within sight of Skiddaw did, and knew him to honour him and to speak well of him. Not a ram-show nor a Herdwick prize show, not a clipping feast nor shepherd's meeting, but 'kenned' Joseph Hawell; and of later years most of the 'Yellow' or Conservative meetings in the district had seen his manly form and heard his manly words in what he used to call 'the national cause.' For Joseph Hawell was a Conservative and a Unionist; 'thoro'-bred' he used to say, for his father and his mother had felt as he did in matters political, and he thought 'they had mixed a laal bit yaller wid his poddish' when he was a boy. At any rate he would have liked well enough to have branded his fleecy {151} Skiddaw darlings with the words 'For King and Country,' and used a yellow 'dip' if such had been in existence. I knew his old father--him of Longlands in Uldale--later of Lonscale; and a better informed man, a man, that is, better read in the news of the day, was hardly to be found in the farm-houses round Keswick. So like Dean Stanley of Westminster he was in face that I would introduce him to my friends as 'the Dean,' and by his side, as he 'cracked' on the things of state, sat usually one of the sweetest-faced, gentlest-natured of women, his good wife, whose maiden name was Jane Walker, of Stockdale. They had married in the 'fifties' of last century, and she had borne him five children--John, Jane (who died in girlhood), Robert, Joseph, and Ann. Joseph was a Christmas present to the old oak cradle at Longlands Farm, for he was born on the 24th December, 1854; and he grew up, with John and Robert, to be as passionately fond of sheep as his father. Never a boy for books much at school, he still as a youngster was ever fond of helping on the Fell, and of training the shepherd's dogs; and rare training he had himself. {152} His father had, from a present of ten gimmer lambs, given him by his father when he was a young man, reared up quite a fine race of the blackfaced Herdwicks, and was, by the time the lads could bear him company, flockmaster of 500 sheep on Frozen Fell and Wylie Ghyll, and of 300 in the Forest, as it is called--the great heathery waste in the basin at the back of Skiddaw.