llages, was persuaded
to take a seat with us as far as his road was the same with ours. We
climbed out of the valley up the bare green hills, and here our driver,
who was from Cheshire, and whose mode of speaking English made him
unintelligible to us, pointed to a house on a distant road, and made an
attempt to communicate something which he appeared to think interesting.
Our Derbyshire friend translated him.

"The water," said he, "that fall on one side of the roof of that 'ouse go
into the 'Umber, and the water that fall on the other side go into the
Mersey. Last winter that 'ouse were covered owre wi' snow, and they made a
_h_archway to go in and out. We 'ad a _h_eighteen month's storm last
winter."

By an "eighteen month's storm" we learned, on inquiry, that he meant
eighteen weeks of continued cold weather, the last winter having been
remarkable for its severity.

Our kind interpreter now left us, and took his way across the fields, down
a path which led through a chasm between high tower-like rocks, called the
Winnets, which etymoloists say is a corruption of Windgates, a name given
to this mountain-pass from the currents of air which are always blowing
through it. Turning out of the main road, we began to ascend a steep green
declivity. To the right of us rose a peaked summit, the name of which our
driver told us was Mam Tor. We left the vehicle and climbed to its top,
where a wide and beautiful prospect was out-spread before us. To the north
lay Edale, a deep and almost circular valley, surrounded by a wavy outline
of pastoral hills, bare of trees, but clothed in living green to their
summits, except on the northern side of the valley, where, half-way down,
they were black with a thick growth of heath. At the bottom of the valley
winded a little stream, with a fringe of trees, some of which on account
of the lateness of the season were not yet in leaf, and near this stream
were scattered, for the most part, the habitations. In another direction
lay the valley of Hopedale, with its two villages, Hope and Castleton, its
ancient castle of the Peverils seated on a rock over the entrance of the
Peak Cavern, and its lead mines worked ever since the time of the Saxons,
the Odin mines as they are called, the white cinders of which lay in heaps
at their entrance. We left the driver to take our baggage to its
destination, and pursued our way across the fields. Descending a little
distance from the summit, we came upon w