I have thus come round to the name of Fairfield, which seemed to me some forty years ago as beyond all reasonable doubt the Danish mask for _Sheep-fell_. But, in using the phrase '_reasonable_ doubt,' I am far from insinuating that Mr. Ferguson's deliberate doubt is _not_ reasonable. I will state both sides of the question, for neither is without some show of argument. To me it seemed next to impossible that the early Danish settlers could, under the natural pressure of prominent differences among that circuit of hills which formed the barriers of Grasmere, have failed to distinguish as the sheep mountain that sole eminence which offered a pasture ground to their sheep all the year round. In summer and autumn _all_ the neighbouring fells, that were not mere rocks, yielded pasture more or less scanty. But Fairfield showed herself the _alma mater_ of their flocks even in winter and early spring. So, at least, my local informants asserted. Mr. Ferguson, however, objects, as an unaccountable singularity, that on this hypothesis we shall have one mountain, and one only, classed under the _modern_ Scandinavian term of _field_; all others being known by the elder name of _fell_. I acknowledge that this anomaly is perplexing. But, on the other hand, what Mr. Ferguson suggests is still more perplexing. He supposes that, 'because' the summit of this mountain is such a peculiarly green and level plain, it might not inappropriately be called _a fair field_.' Certainly it might; but by Englishmen of recent generations, and not by Danish immigrants of the ninth century. To balance the anomaly of what certainly wears a faint _soupcon_ of anachronism--namely, the _apparent_ anticipation of the modern Norse word _field_, Mr. Ferguson's conjecture would take a headlong plunge into good classical English. Now of this there is no other instance. Even the little swells of ground, that hardly rise to the dignity of hills, which might be expected to submit readily to changing appellations, under the changing accidents of ownership, yet still retain their primitive Scandinavian names--as _Butterlip Howe_, for example. Nor do I recollect any exceptions to this tendency, unless in the case of jocose names, such as _Skiddaw's Cub_, for Lattrig; and into this class, perhaps, falls even the dignified mountain of _The Old Man_, at the head of Coniston. Mr. Ferguson will allow that it would be as startling to the dense old Danes of King Alfred's time, if they had found a mountain of extra pretensions wearing a modern English name, as it would to the Macedonian _argyraspides_, if suspecting that, in some coming century, their mighty leader, 'the great Emathian conqueror,' could by any possible Dean of St. Patrick, and by any conceivable audacity of legerdemain, be traced back to _All-eggs-under-the-grate_. If the name really _is_ good English, in that case a separate and _extra_ labour arises for us all; there must have been some old Danish name for this most