ow at the foot of the
Causey Pike tents were pitched, flags were flying, and crowds of men,
women, and children watched the mountain sports.

In the center of a group of spectators two men, stripped to the waist,
were wrestling. They were huge fellows, with muscles that stood out on
their arms like giant bulbs, and feet that held the ground like the
hoofs of oxen. The wrestlers were calm to all outward appearance, and
embraced each other with the quiet fondling of lambs and the sinuous
power of less affectionate creatures. But the people about them were
wildly excited. They stopped to watch every wary movement of the foot,
and craned their necks to catch the subtlest twist of the wrist.

"Sista, Reuben, sista! He'll have enough to do to tummel John Proudfoot.
John's up to the scat to-day, anyways."

"Look tha! John's on for giving him the cross-buttock."

John was the blacksmith, a big buirdly fellow with a larger blunt head.

"And he has given it too, has John."

"Nay, nay, John's doon--ey, ey, he's doon, is John."

One of the wrestlers had thrown the other, and was standing quietly over
him. He was a stalwart young man of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired,
clear-eyed, of a ruddy complexion, with a short, thick, curly beard, and
the grace and bearing that comes of health and strength and a complete
absence of self-consciousness. He smiled cheerfully, and nodded his head
in response to loud shouts of applause. "Weel done! Verra weel done!
That's the way to ding 'em ower! What sayst tha, Reuben?"

"What a bash it was, to be sure!"

"What dusta think you of yon wrestling, ey, man?"

"Nay, nay, it's verra middling."

"Ever seen owt like it since the good auld days you crack on sa often,
auld man?"

"Nay, he doont him verra neat, did Paul--I will allow it."

"There's never a man in Cumberland need take a hand with young Paul
Ritson after this."

"Ey, ey; he's his father's son."

The wrestler, surrounded by a little multitude of boys, who clung to his
sparse garments on every side, made his way to a tent.

At the same moment a ludicrous figure forced a passage through the
crowd, and came to a stand in the middle of the green. It was a
diminutive creature, mounted on a pony that carried its owner on a
saddle immediately below its neck, and a pair of paniers just above its
tail. The rider was an elderly man with shaggy eyebrows and beard of
mingled black and gray. His swarthy, keen wizened face was twisted into