Most notable valleys in the Lake country have their _genius loci_, as is only natural in a region till quite recent times utterly removed from the world's life. And they are often simple folk whose sorrows or humours have acquired immortality from the very seclusion, the normally unruffled calm of their environment. Mary of Buttermere and her harrowing story, for instance, would long ago have been forgotten in Hampshire. But no one reasonably versed in Lakeland lore ever, I trust, crosses the threshold of the Old Fish Inn without taking off his hat, so to speak, to the memory of that ill-used maiden. Her trials, however, were after all comparative; well-looking barmaids suffer much worse things, and men lose their lives over them in various ways once or twice a year. But the sentiment attaching to the personality of this mountain beauty, whom, like Phyllis, all the shepherd swains adored, and yet further celebrated by such visitors as penetrated to this romantic spot, including the Lake poets, made a stir in the world when the villain was hung as high as Haman. The press rang with it, which meant more in those days than in these, and the "Beauty of Buttermere" appeared in various forms upon the stage of London theatres. The Old Fish Inn still stands a little way down the meadow from the village, as it stood over a century ago, when the yeoman father of Mary Robinson, the heroine, presided over it, and she herself ministered to the hunger and thirst of his varied guests. The gentlemen visitors no doubt turned her head a little, though Wordsworth, who had evidently taken a social glass there with Coleridge, reminds him how they had both been stricken with the modest mien of this artless daughter of the hills. But one may safely hazard the belief that Wordsworth was more artless in this kind of divination than the most rustic young woman who ever poured out a glass of beer. De Quincey, who also knew her, bears witness to the admiration the two poets had for her, and has a sly hit at their romantic assumption of her ingenuousness. [Illustration: HEAD OF BUTTERMERE AND HONISTER CRAG]