serviceable of fells; and then we have not merely to explain the present English name, but also to account for the disappearance of this archaeological Danish name. What I would throw out conjecturally as a bare possibility is this:--When an ancient dialect (A) is gradually superseded by a more modern one (E), the flood of innovation which steals over the old reign, and gradually dispossesses it, does not rush in simultaneously as a torrent, but supervenes stealthily and unequally, according to the humouring or thwarting of local circumstances. Nobody, I am sure, is better aware of this accident, as besetting the transit of dialects, than Mr. Ferguson. For instance, many of those words which are imported to us from the American United States, and often amuse us by their picturesqueness, have originally been carried to America by our own people; in England they lurked for ages as provincialisms, localised within some narrow circuit, and to which some trifling barrier (as a river--rivulet--or even a brook) offered a retarding force. In supercivilised England, a river, it may be thought, cannot offer much obstruction to the free current of words; ages ago it must have been bridged over. Sometimes, however, a bridge is impossible under the transcendent importance of a free navigation. For instance, at the Bristol Hotwells, the ready and fluent intercourse with Long Ashton, and a long line of adjacencies, is effectually obstructed by the necessity of an open water communication with the Bristol Channel. At one period (_i. e._ when as yet Liverpool and Glasgow were fifth-rate ports), all the wealth of the West Indies flowed into England through this little muddy ditch of the Bristol Avon, and Rownham Ferry became the exponent and measure of English intercourse with the northern nook of Somersetshire. A river is bad; but when a mountain of very toilsome ascent happens to be interposed, the interruption offered to the popular intercourse, and the results of this interruption, become much more memorable. An illustration which I can offer on this point, and which, in fact, I _did_ offer (as, upon inquiry, Mr. Ferguson will find), thirty-eight years ago, happens to bear with peculiar force upon our immediate difficulty of Fairfield. The valleys on the northern side of Kirkstone--namely, in particular, the three valleys of Patterdale, Matterdale, and Martindale--are as effectually cut off from intercourse with the valleys on the southern side--namely, the Windermere valley, Ryedale, and Grasmere, with all their tributary nooks and attachments--as though an arm of the sea had rolled between them. It costs a foot traveller half of a summer's day to effect the passage to and fro over Kirkstone (what the Greeks so tersely expressed in the case of a race-course[52] by the one word _diaulos_). And in _my_ time no innkeeper from the Windermere side of Kirkstone would carry even a solitary individual across with fewer than four horses.