Lying beside the familiar and continuously beautiful road from Grasmere to Keswick, Thirlmere has happily lost nothing of its pristine beauty in becoming the source of Manchester's water supply. An engine house at one point and the big dam, only visible at the far end, are more than counterbalanced in the raising for many feet of a lake that is three miles long and only a quarter of a mile wide. That first delicious view of it which greets the pilgrim on the downward winding road from the pass of Dunmaile Raise, deep channelled between the rugged wall of Armboth Crags and the northern shoulders of Helvellyn, with the pale cone of Skiddaw rising over the hidden interval beyond, will be among the most familiar memories of the lake tourist. These grey Armboth steeps, falling from the wild moorish table-land above so abruptly to the water's edge, and planting everywhere their knotted pine-feathered toes in the deep clear water, with the little promontories and islands wooded in the like fashion, give a character all its own to the narrow but beautiful lake. As a road now skirts both shores, those denied the physical joy of walking this country can get all that the banks, at any rate, of Thirlmere have to offer. The best of this, no doubt, is the prospect here depicted from the lower end, with Old Helvellyn looming so near and filling up the vista to the southward. [Illustration: GRASMERE FROM LOUGHRIGG] The little inn at Wythburn on the highway near the lake-head where the coaches halt, unpretending tavern in outward appearance though it is, might yet be almost accounted as classic ground for the number of men of note, from Scott and the lake poets onward, its modest walls have sheltered. For it has not only been for all time a halfway resting-place between Ambleside and Keswick, but for many either a starting, or a finishing, point in the ascent of Helvellyn. It was in the little parlour of this inn a century ago that Professor Wilson, the athletic and breezy Scottish Intellectual, played an almost brutal practical joke on his hyper-sensitive friends--the two Coleridges and De Quincey--as they all sat resting here by the fire after a long walk one winter night. Seeing a loaded gun in the corner, the Professor introduced it stealthily into the group, and, pointing it up the chimney, pulled the trigger. In the then diminutive bar parlour, hung about with glass and crockery, the unexpected explosion on the drug-weakened nerves of two, at any rate, of the brilliant trio must have been almost more than the most hardened practical joker could have wished for.