'It's a dark daay for Threlkett is this un, hooiver! T'ald Squire's gone doon!--girtest Master of t' dogs i' Cummerland sin Jwohn Peel I'se warrant him--an' a gay tiff aid feller an' aw. Deeth has hoaled him at last; but what, he'd bin runnin' gaame fer mair nor eighty year noo. He's bin at Maister-o-hunt job langer nor ony man i' t' whoale counttry, I suppoase, has t' aid Squire. It's sixty-fowr year or mair sin he took t' horn. Eh, my! bit what a heart he hed! Kindest-hearted man i' these parts--niver wad let a nebbor-body want for owt if he thowt he cud dea good by lendin' a hand, and pertikler fond o' t' barns; school children was fit to be mad wid him on treat-daays. And why what, he gat scheul-hoose builded, and laid doon a hoondred poond fer Parish Room, let alean gevin site i' t' village. It's a dark day fer Threlkett, I'se telling ye, and dogs hes lost best friend and t' foxes t' warst enemy they've ivver hed here-aboot.' {191} We were standing by the Druid's Circle on Castrigg Fell, and as the old yeoman spoke to me I looked across the valley to the great buttressed height of Blencathra--blacker to-day beneath, by reason of the slight snow covering on its summit, and saw in its grove of larches the white house, half-farm, half-mansion, whence the oldest Master of the Hunt, in Britain, had gone for his far journey. Never again would the men who follow the hounds pass through the gate of the Riddings, with the fox and the hound carved in stone on either side of them, to be met and to be greeted by the cheery old Squire on hunting days; never again, after a long day's hunt, would they repair to the Farrier Inn or to the Salutation Inn, mid-village, to wait the coming of the Master 'ere they all 'howked in' to the 'tatie-pot' he had provided them. There was a time when all the farmhouses for miles round, and every cottage home, was glad, because a Threlkeld man had come to his own again, and I could not help contrasting the gladness of that day, as told us by Wordsworth in his _Feast of Brougham Castle_, and _Song of the Shepherd Lord_, with the sadness of this day for all the country side, {192} now that another shepherd-lord had gone unto his own. That shepherd-lord we read 'Was honoured more and more, And ages after he was laid in earth "The good Lord Clifford" was the name he bore.' They were very different men, that shepherd-lord and this our friend, the Master of the Blencathra Hunt, John Crozier: but both of them had been reared in the same quiet pastoral scene, and among the same fine race of shepherd gentlemen. Both had learned the lesson of this mountain side,-- 'Love had they found in huts where poor men lie, Their daily teachers had been woods and hills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.'