Leave Undercrag, and on regaining the highroad, instead of crossing the bridge to your left, and so returning upon your track, hold straight forward, and you soon enter a little circular basin of green fields, besprinkled with ancient cottages and farms, intersected with stone walls, and enlivened by two or three sparkling brooklets which meet in its centre. It reminds you of De Quincey's description of Easedale—“a chamber within a chamber, or rather a closet within a chamber—a chapel within a cathedral—a little private oratory within a chapel.” The houses in this little den are all within the sweep of the eye, and are easily enumerated; Hollin house, Tongue-house, Beck-house, Long-house, The Thrang, and—what next? Gibraltar!—each with “A few small crofts of stone-encumbered ground, Masses of every shape and size that lie Scattered about beneath the mouldering wall Of the rough precipice, and some apart, In quarters unobnoxious to such chance, As if the moon had rained them down in spite.” [Sidenote: COURTING CUSTOMS.] There is a little book bearing the odd title of “The Old Church Clock,” written by the Rev. Mr Parkinson, canon of Manchester, &c., which, possibly, you may have read. If you have, you may remark how strangely inaccurate the amiable author is in his local geography. To take one instance of many, he represents the sister of his hero to have the very reprehensible habit of slipping out of the paternal door, after bed-time, somewhere about the head of Yewdale, as near as I can fix it, and tripping it deftly over hill and dale, to meet her scamp of a sweetheart in this little dell. The said sweetheart must have been a very irresistible, as well as a very unreasonable personage, to entice a decent man’s daughter to enact the cart going to the horse, and give him the meeting so far from home—for the distance is little short of a round dozen of miles—and she is described as taking the rough, wild road that you have travelled over in this excursion. It is “rather of the ratherest,” and moreover, though this same custom of “meeting by night in the shady boreen” may suit a taste so romantic as that of the reverend author, it is not the custom of the daughters of these dales, who, with a careful regard for personal comfort and security from interruption, always have their wooers within the house after the family retire to rest; and I may quote Anderson, the Cumbrian bard, in support of the correctness of this statement, premising that the customs of this portion of Lancashire are, in all respects, similar to those in Cumberland and Westmorland. He says,—“A Cumbrian peasant pays his addresses to his sweetheart during the silence and solemnity of midnight, when every bosom is at rest, except those of love and sorrow. Anticipating her kindness, he will travel ten or twelve miles over hills, bogs, moors and mosses, undiscouraged by the length of the road, the darkness of the night, or the intemperature of