“There'll be nae shearing here the year, For the craws hae eaten the _bear_ the year.” But the day advances, and you’d better advance along with it, for “you've many a mile to go” before you get back to your comfortable quarters at Conistone. Push on then, along the bye road through the fields, and you again reach the high road. You follow it through the farm-yard—take the gate to the right, and pursue a rough way meandering pleasantly for about a mile through an irregularly-wooded vale. The enormous heaps of loose blue stone on every side of you are from the slate quarries, of which I shall perhaps tell you more when I have more time. The stream you now approach is a branch of the Brathay, which rises on Wrynose and other hills round the head of Little Langdale, down which valley it flows, forming a fine fall at Colwith and at Skelwith, after joining the Great Langdale branch in Elterwater, and become a principal feeder of the “Regal Windermere;” you stand upon the verge of Lancashire, for this brook here divides it from Westmorland. Don’t cross it as yet, but follow its course upwards on the Lancashire side, and you will soon fall in with a primitive stone bridge—one of the very few remaining of those whose rapid disappearance Mr Wordsworth deplores, whilst he expresses admiration of “the daring and graceful contempt of danger and accommodation with which so many of them are constructed, the rudeness of form of some, and their endless variety.” If neglect of danger and accommodation, and rudeness of form, be the distinguishing and essential attributes of the class, this, connecting Tilberthwaite with Little Langdale, and called Slater’s Bridge, ought certainly to be preserved as an exquisite and unique specimen of a style of bridge all but extinct; for the sturdy Dalesmen perversely prefer bridges that are safe and commodious, though they may sacrifice the picturesque and rudeness of form to obtain these vulgar requisites. [Sidenote: DOCTRINES OF MR. WORDSWORTH.]