centers of our circles, and that the
universe revolves about us. This old man suggested a different feeling.
To himself he might have been a thing gone somehow out of its orbit.
There was a listless melancholy, a lonely weariness in his look and
movements. An old misery seemed to sit on him.

His name was Matthew Fisher; but the folk of the country-side called him
Laird Fisher. The dubious dignity came of the circumstance that he was
the holder of an absolute royalty on a few acres of land under
Hindscarth. The royalty had been many generations in his family. His
grandfather had set store by it. When the lord of the manor had worked
the copper pits at the foot of the Eel Crags, he had tried to possess
himself of the royalties of the Fishers. But the peasant family resisted
the aristocrat. Luke Fisher believed there was a fortune under his feet,
and he meant to try his own luck on his holding some day. That day never
came. His son, Mark Fisher, carried on the tradition, but made no effort
to unearth the fortune. They were a cool, silent, slow, and stubborn
race. Matthew Fisher followed his father and his grandfather, and
inherited the family faith. All these years the tenders of the lord of
the manor were ignored, and the Fishers enjoyed their title of courtesy
or badinage. When Matthew was a boy there was a rhyme current in the
vale which ran:

"There's t' auld laird, and t' young laird, and t' laird among t' barns.
If iver there comes another laird, we'll hang-him up by t' arms."

There is a tough bit of Toryism in the grain of these northern
dalesfolk. Their threat was idle; no other laird ever came. Matthew
married, and had one daughter only. He farmed his few acres with poor
results. The ground was good enough, but Matthew was living under the
shadow of the family tradition. One day--it was Sunday morning, and the
sun shone brightly--he was rambling by the Po Beck that rose on
Hindscarth and passed through his land, when his eye glanced over a
glittering stone that lay among the pebbles, at the bottom of the
stream. It was ore, good full ore, and on the very surface. Then the
Laird Fisher sunk a shaft and all his earnings with it in an attempt to
procure iron or copper. The dalespeople derided him, but he held
silently on his way.

"How dusta find the cobbles to-day--any softer?" they would ask.

"As soft as the hearts of most folk," he would answer, and then add in a
murmur, "and maybe a vast harder nor their