Southey's walks, and, as he once wrote to his friend Bedford, doubled the quantum of his daily exercise.

"He was a very good walker, was Mr. Soothey, ye kna' -tall and leish, but had nowt to carry, and cud git ower t' grund weel if he hedn't a beuk in his hand," the same old friend once said; and as he spoke I remembered the way he loved to go round by the Brundholm Woods and across the Greta, and so by the Druid's circle home; how he often clomb Saddleback and Skiddaw, visited Eagle Crag in Borrodale and Honister: how he cared much to visit the quaint little churchyard among the mountains of St. John's Vale, and so again stroll homewards by the haunt of the Druids, or onwards to Dalehead Hall for the poet meetings by Leathes water. I remembered how he described himself as walking hard all day with a single rest upon a stone, and a single apple for his food, and how Sir Henry Taylor, in his notes to "Philip van Arteveld," speaking of him. as a man of sixty summers, could still say:

"With him the strong hilarity of youth

Abides, despite grey hairs, a constant guest."

This hilarity was, doubtless, part of the poet's native stock of quiet humour, but it was also the direct consequence of active health, the result of active habits and simplest life. It is not generally known how, latterly, Crosthwaite churchyard was the poet's favourite haunt. He would go by Howrah, and so by Church Lonning, and Doctor Dub, to the churchyard.

One of the older inhabitants of Crosthwaite parish tells me of the way in which, however absorbed the old poet might seem, he would never forget to pat a child on its head as he passed it. His love for children was wonderful. A child's grave was enough to keep him in Cumberland

till his bones were laid beside it; for the children's sake he toiled unceasingly, and with them he sorrowed and rejoiced. Southey could not hear the patter of the little clogs along the road without hearing the patter of his own bairns upon the way and giving children wayfarers his benediction.

But the bairns of Greta Hall grew up. The girls got beyond the age of the long fillibag trousers trimmed with frills at the ankles, still remembered. They passed the time of dear Mrs. Coleridge's fuss about Sara's frock and gentle Mrs. Southey's careful dressing of her daughters for the dancing master's annual party at the Queen's Head. They passed the time of Mrs. Senhouse's parties at the Bay and the collegians' long vacation ball in the town. Edith the swan-like flew away, and tall Miss Bertha, so like her father the poet, in sweetness of face and in temper, married. Master Cuthbert Southey-Og, King of Bashan, as they called him at Greta Hall-waxed great and got beyond Nurse Betty Thompson's hands or the management of Dan Wilson, the clogger. People hereabout who were lads when Cuthbert was a boy, tell of the quaint tricks played upon him, because they knew of his short sight. Barrows were sometimes set in his path; and Master Southey was sometimes seen to fall over, then pick himself up and put his spectacles on, and look without a complaint at the unseemly obstruction that had brought about his fall. Og, King of Bashan, he was rightly called. But he grew on, shock-headed, tall, with eyes of wonderful grey, high forehead, strong nose, stronger chin than his father, and with a lower lip that quaintly hung, as they say in Cumberland, a little like a motherless foal's.

"The leanest, lankiest, longest lad I ever knew," so wrote a friend of more than half a century ago.

So long was he that there are doorways in Keswick still

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shown where Master Southey always bumped his head; so lean and lanky that, when he was preparing to go to college, his father spoke of him and wrote of him not as Og, nor as Cuthbert, nor as Karl, but as the North Pole." Cuthbert Southey is well remembered as a boy in Keswick, for Cuthbert, because he filled in a measure Herbert's place, was kept with diligence at home. He regretted this himself; he never learned boys' ways, and grew up with a certain shyness that lasted all his days. And yet "fair seed-time had his soul," and almost the last time I talked with him his eyes glowed, though his voice quavered as his father's voice used to quaver, as he told of the perfect lessons of patient cheerfulness, of unselfish industry, of constant tender kindness and high-minded simplicity he learned in those young boyhood days from that noble spirit of the genius of Greta Hall.

"Take him all in all, though I have lived nearly as many years as my father, I have not seen his like for perfect gentlemanhood. The more I have seen of literary men, the more do I marvel at the pure unselfishness and preeminent goodness of my father; and I am more glad each year that I bestowed such care as I could upon his Life and Correspondence, because I feel that it, with the Southey's Letters my brother-in-law edited, reflects faithfully the essence of his character.”

In some such words did Cuthbert speak of the father who begat him—and now Cuthbert cannot speak more. The last of the voices at Greta Hall is silent. The last of the Southeys of Greta Hall days has gone home.

It was a day of storm and gloom, as bitter as that wild March morning in 1843 when Wordsworth and his son-inlaw Quillinan stood beside the Laureate father's grave in Crosthwaite churchyard. There was no sudden shining.

after rain, no robins sang hard by for us, as then they sang. We, the mourners, were gathered at short notice by an open grave beside the rushing Louther stream. The pastor of Askham had suddenly been called away from his flock, and Death had led him very gently, through the swoon that knows no waking, to the land that is very far off.

The bell tolled sadly in the hollow beside the stream; sadly on that dark December day yeomen friends were seen bearing the body of Cuthbert Southey to the church. Tenderly then a hymn was sung, reverently the prayers were said, and we left the poet's son, whose youth had known the sound of the Greta, whose manhood had heard the flow of the Parratt stream, to rest unhearing, in a fair spot for any poet's son to sleep in, beside the Lowther, till the river sing no more its requiem, and the dead in Christ arise.

The last of the Southeys of Greta Hall has gone home; the book of Greta Hall memories is closed for ever. Νο wonder we grieve as we stand to-night at Greta Hall; no wonder the Greta seems to share our sorrow. But the western light beyond grey Grisedale grows in glory, and ere its wonder fades from out the heavens, lo! high o'er Hindscarth gleams the evening star.

THE SHEEP-DOG TRIALS AT

TROUTBECK.

IT was a day dropped from heaven for the purpose; a heavy dew lay on the grass of the terrace-garden above the Bratha, and the light mist over Elleray and the Furness Fells sailed away into sun and azure sky beneath the steady breath of a light north-west wind.

"Wedder ull not brek to-day, ye may depend ont," said a yeoman at my side; "sae what, ye mud gang to Trootbeck. Ye'll hev' as bonny a day upon fells 'mang dogs as ivver mortal man cud whope for, I'se warrant ye."

I took my old friend's advice, and was soon speeding along with a fair wind behind me down the river, gay with its last patches of purple loose-strife and meadowsweet, past the Roman camp and the solemn sentinel firs at the river's mouth, away to the well-known hostelry that Hartley Coleridge was so fond of Low-wood, by the side of Lake Windermere. Arrived there, a friend joined me who knew the shortest cut to Troutbeck Vale and the Windermere reservoir, close to which would be gathered to-day every shepherd who owned a clever shepherd-dog for twenty miles round or more, to try their luck for the