snow which lay long and late on the bleak high ground. I have known
people who, travelling by the mail-coach over Blackstone Edge, had been
snowed up for a week or ten days at the little inn near the summit, and
obliged to spend both Christmas and New Year's Day there, till the store
of provisions laid in for the use of the landlord and his family falling
short before the inroads of the unexpected visitors, they had recourse to
the turkeys, geese, and Yorkshire pies with which the coach was laden;
and even these were beginning to fail, when a fortunate thaw released
them from their prison.

Isolated as the hill villages may be, they are in the world, compared
with the loneliness of the grey ancestral houses to be seen here and
there in the dense hollows of the moors. These dwellings are not large,
yet they are solid and roomy enough for the accommodation of those who
live in them, and to whom the surrounding estates belong. The land has
often been held by one family since the days of the Tudors; the owners
are, in fact, the remains of the old yeomanry--small squires--who are
rapidly becoming extinct as a class, from one of two causes. Either the
possessor falls into idle, drinking habits, and so is obliged eventually
to sell his property: or he finds, if more shrewd and adventurous, that
the "beck" running down the mountain-side, or the minerals beneath his
feet, can be turned into a new source of wealth; and leaving the old
plodding life of a landowner with small capital, he turns manufacturer,
or digs for coal, or quarries for stone.

Still there are those remaining of this class--dwellers in the lonely
houses far away in the upland districts--even at the present day, who
sufficiently indicate what strange eccentricity--what wild strength of
will--nay, even what unnatural power of crime was fostered by a mode of
living in which a man seldom met his fellows, and where public opinion