lthough unweaned infants
are ordinarily pale, yet, amongst those approaching their eighteenth
or twentieth month, there are often found children as rosy as any one
can meet with.]

Many scores of times I had heard men threatening to _skiander_ this
person or that when next they should meet. Not by possibility could it
indicate any mode of personal violence; for no race of men could be
more mild and honourably forbearing in their intercourse with each
other than the manly dalesmen of the Lakes. From the context, it had
long been evident that it implied expostulation and _verbal_ reproach.
And now at length I learned that this was its Danish import. The very
mountain at the foot of which my Grasmere cottage stood, and the
little orchard attached to which formed 'the lowest step in that
magnificent staircase' (such was Wordsworth's description of it),
leading upwards to the summits of Helvellyn, reminded me daily of that
Danish language which all around me suggested as being the secret
writing--the seal--the lock that imprisoned ancient records as to
thing or person, and yet again as being the key that should open this
lock; as that which had hidden through many centuries, and yet also as
that which should finally reveal.

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 anomal