winds and the
waters they will echo ten thousand years hence. It is as though you have
passed out of time into eternity, where a thousand years are as one day.
There is no calendar for this dateless world. The buzzard that you have
startled from its pool in the gully and that circles round with
wide-flapping wings has a lineage as ancient as the hills, and the vision
of the pikes of Langdale that bursts on you as you reach the summit of Esk
hause is the same vision that burst on the first savage who adventured into
these wild fastnesses of the mountains.

And then as the sun begins to slope to the west you remember that, if you
are among immortal things, you are only a mortal yourself, that you are
getting footsore, and that you need a night's lodging and the comforts of
an inn. Whither shall we turn? The valleys call us on every side. Newlands
wide vale we can reach, or cheerful Borrowdale, or lonely Ennerdale,
or--yes, to-night we will sup at Wastdale, at the jolly old inn that Auld
Will Ritson used to keep, that inn sacred to the cragsman, where on New
Year's Eve the gay company of climbers foregather from their brave deeds on
the mountains and talk of hand-holds and foot-holds and sing the song of
"The rope, the rope," and join in the chorus as the landlord trolls out:

I'm not a climber, not a climber,
Not a climber now,
My weight is going fourteen stone--
I'm not a climber now.

We shall not find Gaspard there to-night--Gaspard, the gay and intrepid
guide from the Dauphine, beloved of all who know the lonely inn at
Wastdale. He is away on the battle-field fighting a sterner foe than the
rocks and precipices of Great Gable and Scawfell. But Old Joe, the
shepherd, will be there--Old Joe, who has never been in a train or seen a
town and whose special glory is that he can pull uglier faces than any man
in Cumberland. He will not pull them for anybody--only when he is in a good
humour and for his cronies in the back parlour. To-night, perchance, we
shall see his eyes roll as he roars out the chorus of "D'ye ken John Peel?"
Yes, Wastdale shall be to-night's halt. And so over Black Sail, and down
the rough mountain side to the inn whose white-washed walls hail us from
afar out of the gathering shadows of the valley.

To-morrow? Well, to-morrow shall be as to-day. We will shoulder our
rucksacks early, and be early on the mountains, for the first maxim in
going a journey is the early start. Have the wh