of farmers or shepherds. But the
tradition of former greatness was jealously preserved in the family; it
lived on in the baptismal names which they gave to their children and
fostered in them a love of independence together with a spirit of
reserve which was not always appreciated by their neighbours. But the
spirit of the age was at work in them as in so many other families in
the dale villages. Peregrine's six sons had long since left him alone in
his steading on the moors: some had gone down to the manufacturing towns
of the West Riding and had prospered in trade; others had fought, and
more than one had fallen, in the Napoleonic wars. Peregrine, therefore,
although seventy-six years of age and a widower, had no one to share
roof and board with him in his shepherd's cottage a thousand feet above
the sea.

Below, in the dale, lay the villages with their clustered farmsteads and
their square-towered churches of Norman foundation. Round about his
steading, which was screened by sycamores from the westerly gales, lay
the mountain pastures, broken by terraces of limestone rock. Above,
where the limestone yields place to the millstone, were the high moors
and fells, where grouse, curlews and merlins nested among the heather,
and hardy, blue-faced sheep browsed on the mountain herbage.

It was Peregrine's duty to shepherd on these unenclosed moors the sheep
and lambs which belonged to the farmers in the dale below. Each farmer
was allowed by immemorial custom to pasture so many sheep on the moors
the number being determined by the acreage of his farm. During the
lambing season, in April and May, all the sheep were below in the crofts
behind the farmsteads, where the herbage was rich and the weakly ewes
could receive special attention; but by the twentieth of May the flocks
were ready for the mountain grass, and then it was that Peregrine's year
would properly begin. The farmers, with their dogs in attendance, would
drive their sheep and lambs up the steep, zigzagging path that led to
Peregrine's steading, and there the old shepherd would receive his
charges. Dressed in his white linen smock, his crook in his hand, and
his white beard lifted by the wind, he would take his place at the mouth
of the rocky defile below his house. At a distance he might easily have
been mistaken for a bishop standing at the altar of his cathedral church
and giving his benediction to the kneeling multitudes. There was dignity
in every movement a