The youths of a neighbourhood, rich and poor, were all educated together; a circumstance which diffused and kept alive a plain familiarity of intercourse among all ranks of people, which inspired the lowest with independence of sentiment, and infused no insolent or unreal consequence into the wealthy. Thus it was no unusual thing for the yeoman and the shepherd to enliven their employments or festivities with recitations from the bucolics of Virgil, the idyls of Theocrites, or the wars of Troy. A story is told of the late Mr. John Gunson, a worthy miller, who formerly kept the Plough Inn, a small public-house near the Church at Ulpha. Two or three young fellows from a neighbouring town, or, as some say, a party of students from St. Bees School, being out on a holiday excursion, called at John's, and after regaling themselves with his ale, and indulging in a good deal of quizzing and banter at the landlord's expense, demanded their bill. John in his homely country dialect, said, "Nay, we niver mak' any bills here, ye hev so much to pay"--mentioning the sum. "O," replied one of the wags, "you cannot write: that is the cause of your excuse." John, who had quietly suffered them to proceed in their remarks, retired, and in a short time brought them in a bill written out in the Hebrew language, which it need scarcely be said quite puzzled them. He then sent them one in Greek, and afterwards in Latin, neither of which they could make out. They then begged that he would tell them in plain English what they had to pay. John laughed heartily at their ignorance, which on this occasion shone as conspicuous as their impertinence to their learned and unassuming host. If such was the level upon which the yeomanry stood in an educational sense, their favourite plan of bringing up their younger sons to the learned professions, and especially the pulpit, may account for a saying which is almost proverbial in Cumberland, "Owt 'll mak' a parson!" meaning thereby that if one of their sons proved more stupid than another, the church was the proper destination for him. In the more secluded valleys the scholars were taught in the church; the curate, who was also schoolmaster, sitting within the communion rails, and using the table as a desk, while the children occupied the pews or the open space beside him. In the parish register of the last named chapelry is a notice, that a youth who had quitted the valley, and died in one of the towns on the coast of Cumberland, had requested that his body should be brought and interred at the foot of the pillar by which he had been accustomed to sit while a school-boy.