They were to pass, in their return, through an estate belonging to Mr. Forester, for the purpose of taking up his aunt Miss Evergreen, who was to accompany them to Redrose Abbey. On arriving at an inn on the nearest point of the great road, Mr. Forester told Sir Telegraph that, from the arrangements he had made, it was impossible for any carriage to enter his estate, as he had taken every precaution for preserving the simplicity of his tenants from the contagious exhibitions and examples of luxury. ‘This road,’ said he, ‘is only accessible to pedestrians and equestrians: I have no wish to exclude the visits of laudable curiosity, but there is nothing I so much dread and deprecate as the intrusion of those heartless fops, who take their fashionable autumnal tour, to gape at rocks and waterfalls, for which they have neither eyes nor ears, and to pervert the feelings and habits of the once simple dwellers of the mountains.[64] Nature seems to have raised her mountain-barriers for the purpose of rescuing a few favoured mortals from the vortex of that torrent of physical and moral degeneracy which seems to threaten nothing less than the extermination of the human species:[65] but in vain, while the annual opening of its sluices lets out a side stream of the worst specimens of what is called refined society, to inundate the mountain valleys with the corruptions of metropolitan folly. Thus innocence, and health, and simplicity of life and manners, are banished from their last retirement, and nowhere more lamentably so than in the romantic scenery of the northern lakes, where every wonder of nature is made an article of trade, where the cataracts are locked up, and the echoes are sold: so that even the rustic character of that ill-fated region is condemned to participate in the moral stigma which must dwell indelibly on its poetical name.’ The party alighted, and a consultation being held, it was resolved to walk to the village in a body, the Honourable Mrs. Pinmoney lifting her hands and eyes in profound astonishment at Mr. Forester’s old-fashioned notions.