Our road to Rydal lay through Ambleside, which is certainly a very pretty town, and looks cheerfully on a sunny day. We saw Miss Martineau's residence, called the Knoll, standing high up on a hillock, and having at its foot a Methodist chapel, for which, or whatever place of Christian worship, this good lady can have no occasion. We stopped a moment in the street below her house, and deliberated a little whether to call on her, but concluded otherwise. After leaving Ambleside, the road winds in and out among the hills, and soon brings us to a sheet (or napkin, rather, than a sheet) of water, which the driver tells us is Rydal Lake! We had already heard that it was but three quarters of a mile long, and one quarter broad; still, it being an idea of considerable size in our minds, we had inevitably drawn its ideal physical proportions on a somewhat corresponding scale. It certainly did look very small; and I said, in my American scorn, that I could carry it away easily in a porringer; for it is nothing more than a grassy-bordered pool among the surrounding hills, which ascend directly from its margin; so that one might fancy it not a permanent body of water, but a rather extensive accumulation of recent rain. Moreover, it was rippled with a breeze, and so, as I remember it, though the sun shone, it looked dull and sulky, like a child out of humor. Now the best thing these small ponds can do is to keep perfectly calm and smooth, and not to attempt to show off any airs of their own, but content themselves with serving as a mirror for whatever of beautiful or picturesque there may be in the scenery around them. The hills about Rydal water are not very lofty, but are sufficiently so as objects of every-day view,--objects to live with,--and they are craggier than those we have hitherto seen, and bare of wood, which indeed would hardly grow on some of their precipitous sides.