On the afternoon of February the 4th, 1848, she left home in accordance with an arrangement made with a traveller from Ulverstone, who had offered to take her over Birker Moor in his gig to Eskdale, where she wished to visit some relations—the friendly traveller agreeing to pick her up at a stated hour at the end of the Birker Moor road. She unfortunately had been too late, and had walked onwards, as was supposed, under the impression that he was behind and would overtake her. However that might be, no alarm was felt on her account at home, until Miss Tyson, the clergyman’s daughter, called at the cottage on her way from Eskdale, and it then came out that she had not been seen there, though that was the sixth day after her departure. The neighbourhood was alarmed instantly, and a long line of willing and anxious friends, taking the whole breadth of the wild moor before them, soon discovered her body lying about forty yards from the road, where, but for the continual misty state of the atmosphere during the whole week, she must have been discovered days before by people passing along the road. The lacerated condition of her hands and knees and her torn dress shewed that the poor old woman, after losing the power of walking, had struggled onwards, no one knows how far, upon her hands and knees: she had taken out her spectacles, as it was thought, to assist her in seeing her way through the bewildering mist; and she had lost a handkerchief, containing oranges for her grandchildren, at some distance from the spot where she died. I am well qualified to speak as to what the poor old creature must have suffered from the weather, for I had to cross over Walna Scar (which is near two thousand feet high) twice upon the day she perished, and though I am tolerably robust, and had the assistance of an active pony, I nearly sunk under it myself. There had been a heavy snow which, for a day or two, under the influence of soft weather and showers, had been melting; the whole country was saturated with wet—“every road was a syke, every syke a beck, and every beck a river.” The high lands were covered with a thick, cold, driving, suffocating mist, which every now and then thinned a little to make way for one of these thorough-bred mountain showers, of which none can have any conception who have not faced them on the fells in winter—wetting you to the skin and chilling you to the marrow in three seconds, and piercing your exposed skin like legions of needles and pins. The hollows in the road, which are neither few nor far between, were filled with snow in a state of semifluidity, cold as if it had been melted with salt, through which I splashed and struggled, dragging my floundering, jaded pony after me with the greatest difficulty. Though my road was over a much greater elevation than Mary Hird's, hers would be nearly as much exposed to the weather and as completely covered in by the smothering mist; it is therefore