ms are too often those who see no offense in the
violation of its spirit.

My principal scenes are again among the mountains of Cumberland; but in
this second attempt I have tried to realize more completely their
solitude and sweetness, their breezy healthfulness, and their scent as
of new-cut turf, by putting them side by side with scenes full of the
garrulous clangor and the malodor of the dark side of London.

When I began, I thought to enlarge the popular knowledge of our robust
north-country by the addition of some whimsical character and quaint
folk-lore. If much of this quiet local atmosphere has had to make way
before one strong current of tragic feeling, I trust some of it remains
that is fresh and bracing in the incidents of the booth, the smithy, the
dalesman's wedding, the rush-bearing, the cock-fighting, and the
sheep-shearing. Those readers of the earlier book who found human nature
and an element of humor in the patois, will regret with me the necessity
so to modify the dialect in this book as to remove from it nearly all
the race quality that comes of intonation.

I ought to add that one of my characters, Parson Christian, is a
portrait of a dear, simple, honest soul long gone to his account, and
that the words here put into his mouth are oftener his own than mine.

I trust this book may help to correct a prevailing misconception as to
the morals and mind of the typical English peasantry. It is certain that
the conventional peasant of literature, the broad-mouthed rustic in a
smock-frock, dull-eyed, mulish, beetle-headed, doddering, too vacant to
be vicious, too doltish to do amiss, does not exist as a type in
England. What does exist in every corner of the country is a peasantry
speaking a patois that is often of varying inflections, but is always
full of racy poetry, illiterate and yet possessed of a vast oral
literature, sharing brains with other classes more equally than
education, humorous, nimble-witted; clear-sighted, astute, cynical, not
too virtuous, and having a lofty, contempt for the wiseacres of the
town.

The manners and customs, the folk lore and folk-talk of Cumberland are
far from exhausted in my two Cumberland novels; but it is not probable
that I shall work in this vein again. In parting from it, may I venture
to hope that here and there a reader grown tired of the life of the
great cities has sometimes found it a relief to escape with me into
these mountain solitudes and look upo