stmoreland saying: 'Ef ye'll nobbut
send us a gude schulemeaster, a verra' moderate parson 'ull dea!' and
whose slow minds, therefore, were filled with a strong inarticulate
sense of difference as they saw him pass along the road, and recalled
the incumbent of their childhood, dropping in for his 'crack' and his
glass of 'yale' at this or that farmhouse on any occasion of local
festivity, or driving his sheep to Whinborough market with his own hands
like any other peasant of the dale.

Within the last twenty years, however, the few remaining survivors of
this primitive clerical order in the Westmoreland and Cumberland valleys
have dropped into their quiet unremembered graves, and new men of other
ways and other modes of speech reign in their stead. And as at Long
Whindale, so almost everywhere, the change has been emphasised by the
disappearance of the old parsonage houses with their stone floors, their
parlours lustrous with oak carving on chest or dresser, and their
encircling farm-buildings and meadows, in favour of an upgrowth of new
trim mansions designed to meet the needs, not of peasants, but of
gentlefolks.

And naturally the churches too have shared in the process of
transformation. The ecclesiastical revival of the last half-century has
worked its will even in the remotest corners of the Cumbrian country,
and soon not a vestige of the homely worshipping-places of an earlier
day will remain. Across the road, in front of the Long Whindale
parsonage, for instance, rose a freshly built church, also peaked and
gabled, with a spire and two bells, and a painted east window, and
Heaven knows what novelties besides. The primitive whitewashed structure
it replaced had lasted long, and in the course of many generations time
had clothed its moss-grown walls, its slated porch, and tombstones worn
with rain in a certain beauty of congruity and association, linking it
with the purple distances of the fells, and the brawling river bending
round the gray enclosure. But finally, after a period of quiet and
gradual decay, the ruin of Long Whindale chapel had become a quick and
hurrying ruin that would not be arrested. When the rotten timbers of the
roof came dropping on the farmers' heads, and the oak benches beneath
offered gaps, the geography of which had to be carefully learnt by the
substantial persons who sat on them, lest they should be overtaken by
undignified disaster; when the rain poured in on the Communion Table and