The vale of Seathwaite now assumes a more attractive aspect; your pleasantest road lies through the farm-yard of Cockley Beck, and that hearty-looking elderly man, the uniform cherry-colour of whose honest phiz bespeaks exposure to many a biting mountain blast, is Daniel Tyson himself. If you are disposed to rest and chat awhile, you may lead him, nothing loath, into conversation, and if you do so, I fancy that some of his communications will surprise, if they don’t interest you; for instance, in allusion to some skins you may notice hung up to dry, he will inform you that the weasels about Cockley Beck have a fashion, on the advent of winter, of changing their colour from brown to white, resuming their more sombre coloured coats on the return of spring; a fact in local zoology of which I incline to imagine you have not hitherto been cognisant. He will also tell you, should anything suggest the subject, that, in one of his pastures, a little up the beck, there existed, till within the last few years, a number of graves arranged in rows, but which now, either from the sinking of the soil, or the growth of the surrounding moss, &c., have become level with the adjacent surface, and all distinct traces of them obliterated. What rather adds to the interest excited by these mysterious tombs is, that there is no history, authentic, traditional, or legendary, to account for their existence—thus affording a capital field for those imaginative geniuses who love to speculate upon such mysteries or to frame what maybe awanting for their satisfactory development. With me the favourite probability in this instance is, that a skirmish, tolerably fatal, has been fought in this sequestered nook during the progress of some of the horrible wars that, from time to time, have saddened our merry land, and that the slain have been buried here where they fell; but, whether the supposed skirmish was fought between the factions of York and Lancaster about the time poor King Henry sought and found, for a season, a house of refuge in this vicinity; or between the Cavaliers and Roundheads, when the Flemings of Conistone stood out for Church and King; or between the Dalesmen themselves and a stray party of Moss-trooping Scots, who, “in the old riding times,” occasionally pushed their predatory incursions even into these poor valleys, neither Mr Tyson nor I will inform you, for, as I said before, history, authentic and apocryphal, is silent on the subject, Daniel is a man of verity, and I am but a lame hand at invention; therefore you need not hope for even a fabricated story (which, after all, would be better than none), in connection with this now effaced souvenir of the good old times. [Illustration: THE STEPPING STONES.] [Sidenote: A SUBJECT OF SONNETS.]