This propensity extends too amongst the women as well as the men: one woman declared she would as lieve part with the skin off her back as with her money. And yet there are things which they will not do for money, as thousands of the poor in other districts do,--they won’t work in a factory. The experiment was tried in this dale; but the people, like the French, would only work just when they pleased, and soon would not work at all. One would have thought that the strong love of gain amongst them, and their industrious habits, would have insured success to such an experiment; but they had too much love for their own firesides, and the enjoyment of the fresh mountain air; the parents had too much love for their children to subject them to the daily incarceration amid heat, and dust, and flue from the cotton. The scheme failed; the factory stands a ruinous monument of the attempt, and these beautiful dales are yet free from the factory system. And yet, peaceful, and far removed as they are from the acts and oppressions by which the strong build their houses, and add field to field out of the toils of the weak, they are not unacquainted with occasional instances of the evils done with impunity in the nooks of the world. I do not mean to represent such spots as Arcadias of purity and perfection. In the former chapter, and in this, I have indicated the vices which flourish, and the depravity which spreads in the shade of secluded life. The worst feature of these dales is the penurious spirit which little opportunity of profit produces; but I do not know that this spirit is a more sordid one than pervades the lower streets and alleys of large towns. There is along with it a strong sense of meum and tuum; a strong and uncorrupted moral principle; and no man is in danger of either being filched of his purse, or if he chanced to lose it by accident, of not regaining it. As the pressure of poverty is not so tremendous, so the extinction of the moral sense is by no means so great as in large towns; and, on the other hand, how much more delightful a view of the social life of these people we have, than of those of similar rank in our large manufacturing towns, and especially amongst the lower classes of the metropolis, where they tread on each other from their multitudes, and yet, from the same cause, pass through life strangers to each other. Here the social sympathies are strongly called forth; a sort of kinship seems to pervade the whole neighbourhood; and they pass their lives, if in a good deal of poverty, yet in mutual confidence, and very pleasant habits of association. Every man and every spot has a name and share of distinction. Every gill and beck have their appellation, as Hacker-gill; Arten-gill; How-gill; Cow-gill; Spice-gill; Thomas O’Harbour-gill; Backstone-gill; Kale-beck; Monkey-beck. Every house has its name;--as Tinkler’s Budget; Clint; Henthwaite-Hall; Coat-Fall; The Birchen Tree; Lile-Town; Riveling;