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lakes. Actually there is not a lake in the whole area. We natives refer to our bits of water as meres and tarns. A lake is something much larger, and much less lovely. It was Thomas Gray who first went spouting tales of the “lakes” to be enjoyed here. He was soon followed by others—Southey, Coleridge, and of course our own William Wordsworth, who lived right in Grasmere for several years.
    Over the past ten years we have become the tourist attraction of the country. I cannot begin to describe the mess and confusion these visitors bring. In the first place, they have no real appreciation of our landscape. They peer from a carriage window when the beauty can only be gained by walking, by clambering up fells to look down at the tarns of various hues and shapes. The colour will change before your very eyes from blue to green or even black, as the clouds pass by overhead. The waters nestle in secret dales and valleys between the hills, the pikes, and the fells. The tourists who do not get out of their carriages miss the bracing air, the aroma of the bog myrtle, most of all the challenge of the fells. The fells are the real attraction of the place.
    For maximum viewing pleasure one should avoid coming during the bracken season, as we call that time between late June and late September, which is exactly when the greatest number of tourists come. At that time the contours of the fells are hidden by the monotonous fern that covers them like a green blanket. The weather too is wretched — too hot most of the time, relieved only by the wettest rain in the world. It comes in blankets, in sheets, in counterpanes to saturate us. You have not been wet till you have been rained on here.
    If you want to see us at our best, come in April or October. Do not come in the dead of the summer, like the tourists who clutter up the hotels and inns and drive up prices. Not that you will find a lack of accommodation! We have been inundated by a sea of businessmen wishing to capitalize on the new tourist industry. Many a garish mansion has been thrown up, to clash dreadfully with the simple architecture of the countryside and to take up land needed for our livelihood. I refer, of course, to our Herdwick sheep. Unlovely, smelly, oily, white-faced, and rugged as the natives, they dot the fells year round, eking out a diet that would starve other sheep, and growing a coarse, long fleece used for carpets and roughage in the Cumberland tweed.
    But I have digressed into a travel brochure. Edward succumbed to Nature, in the form of Lady Emily. They walked out together; his poems found a new object of dedication. The “barren fells” and “limpid blue pools” of yore were transformed into “sweet delights” of femininity. The limpid blue pools remained but came in pairs, fringed with lashes. Edward had not begun to think of anything so down-to-earth as marriage, I am sure, but Emily was beginning to look about the saloon with a somewhat proprietary eye. She had hemmed up half a dozen handkerchiefs for him, embroidered with a design which Nora thinks is supposed to be an E. I think she would be better employed wielding a mop or broom at home.
    Nora had not completely abandoned all thoughts of sharing the roof with a Lady. She is a wee bit of a snob, to tell the truth, but no one is perfect. “A pity about the dowry,” she was wont to say, but soon began adding such leading remarks as, “At least she is not demanding. She is always perfectly happy with pot luck.” On another occasion the remark, in the same insinuating spirit, was, “How very much at home Emily (sans the Lady now) looks in our little tinker’s wagon.”
    Each sally was met with a steely eye from myself. I (who was in charge of the accounts for the establishment) knew we must marry Edward to at least a small heiress, not an impecunious Lady who might well change her demands once she was installed as mistress of Ambledown. Due to Edward’s detached, lackadaisical way of going on,