Perhaps the most interesting bit of information I obtained, before our pleasant chat was at an end, was a description of the way in which the poet composed on the grass terrace at Rydal Mount. 'Eh! blessed barn,' my informant continued, 'I think I can see him at it now. He was ter'ble thrang with visitors and folks, you mun kna, at times, but if he could git awa fra them for a spell, he was out upon his gres walk; and then he would set his head a bit forrad, and put his hands behint his back. And then he would start a bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, {16} stop; then bum, bum, bum reet down till t'other end, and then he'd set down and git a bit o' paper out and write a bit; and then he git up, and bum, bum, bum, and goa on bumming for long enough right down and back agean. I suppose, ya kna, the bumming helped him out a bit. However, his lips was always goan' whoale time he was upon the gres walk. He was a kind mon, there's no two words about that: if any one was sick i' the plaace, he wad be off to see til 'em.' And so ended my Easter Monday talk with the poet's quondam gardener's boy, the now typical beerhouse-keeper, half pleased, half proud, to remember his old master in such service as he rendered him, in the days when it was judged that to keep a boy out of mischief and from bad company it was advisable to get him a place at Rydal Mount. I must ask you next to take a seat with me in a waller's cottage. If tea and bread and butter is offered, you had better take it also, it is almost sure to be pressed upon you, and it is of the best. I will be interrogator, only by way of introduction saying, that our host is a splendid type of the real Westmoreland {17} gentleman labourer, who was in his days a wrestler too, and whose occupation at the building of _Foxhow_ and _Fiddler's Farm_ in the Rydal Valley, often allowed him to see the poet in old times. 'Well, George, what sort o' a man in personal appearance was Mr. Wordsworth?' 'He was what you might ca' a ugly man,--mak of John Rigg much,--much about seame height, 6 feet or 6 feet 2,--smaller, but deal rougher in the face.' I knew John Rigg by sight, and can fancy from the pictures of the poet that the likeness is striking in the brow and profile. 'But he was,' continued George, 'numbledy in t' kneas, walked numbledy, ye kna, but that might o' wussened wi' age.' In George's mind age accounted for most of the peculiarities he had noticed in the poet, but George's memory could go back fifty years, and he ought to have remembered Wordsworth as hale and hearty. 'He wozn't a man as said a deal to common fwoak. But he talked a deal to hissen. I often seead his lips a gaäin', and he'd a deal o' mumblin' to hissel, and 'ud stop short and be a lookin' down upo' the ground, as if he was in a thinkin' waäy. But that might ha' growed on him wi' age, an' aw, ye kna.' {18} How true, thought I, must have been the poet's knowledge of himself.