RAMBLES AMONG THE HILLS.

CHAPTER I.

CHATSWORTH.

Chatsworth Park.-The Travelling Tinker.-Filial Gratitude.-The Two Ends of Life.-Darley Dale.-An Ancient Yew.-The Crusader's Heart.-A Comfortable Hotel.-Sunshine and Cloud. -Woods at Chatsworth.-Old Oaks in the Park.-Beeley Moor. -Pudding Pie Hill.-English Weather. -The Adopted Child. -Realities of Gipsy Life.-The Encampment.-Horse-dealing. -Through the Wood to Chatsworth.-The Library and its Treasures.-Claude Lorraine.—Generosity of the British Public.

ONE afternoon on my arrival at Chatsworth-the very best head-quarters that can be chosen for excursions in Derbyshire-I strolled into the beautiful Park, and found that I had it all to myself, with the exception of an old man who was plodding slowly along, pushing a little tinker's cart before him. He was rather lame, and seemed very tired; there was therefore every reason for supposing that a rest would be welcome to him. I pulled out my pocket-knife, and asked him to grind it for me. His little barrow-like machine was so arranged that the wheel in front on which he rolled it from place to place became also the wheel for turning the leatherband round the grindstone. First he lifted up the lid

of a box, and pulled out a piece of tin with which he scraped the mud off the wheel. Then he put on the band, began working the treadle with his foot, and very soon a little shower of sparks was flying from my knife. From time to time he left off grinding, and tried the edge on his thumb-nail. I noticed that he was thin, grey, and careworn, and that he spoke like a man of fair education and intelligence. I asked him if he travelled far.

"Not a very wide circuit," said he, "for I have a lame leg, and cannot go far. Besides, as you see, I am getting old. It's a bad thing to be old, sir."

"How far do you go a-day?"

"About seven or eight miles is as much as I can do now. I go from Sheffield to Buxton-that is my round, but it takes me a long time to do it."

66 Is your home at Sheffield ? I asked.

"I have no whoam now, sir, for you see all my children are grown up and married, and they seldom. come near me. So I have no whoam."

It seemed to him quite natural that as soon as his children were able to provide homes for themselves, he should be left without one.

"But wherever I go," continued the old man, "it is not very easy now to get a place to sleep in. The public-houses do not want me, and I have to go to a lodging-house, where they charge me sixpence for a bed. It takes me a long time to earn sixpence, and if I did not have two or three customers on the road who gave me a little extra, I could not get along at all. When I

sleep at a public-house, I am obliged to drink something, or they would not take me in, and that soon spoils the day's work."

He now pulled out a bottle of oil from his pocket, and took a stone from his box, and began sharpening up the knife, which he presently handed to me saying, "There, sir, that will pare off any corn now." The trees were all in the first fresh beauty of summer, the lilacs and laburnums were in flower, and along the road there passed a group of happy children, carrying in their hands branches of the hawthorn. They, too, in their time would desert the parent roof, and be themselves deserted, and life would seem no better a thing to them than it did to yonder poor old man, hobbling wearily along the last stage of his journey.

Through meadows bedecked with flowers, and by the side of the river Derwent, shining in the sun like the river which another tinker saw in his dream, I walked on to Darley Dale, whither I was bound on a pilgrimage to see a yew-tree, reputed to be the largest in the county, and of great age. Man's years are three-score and ten, but many such periods put together would not reckon the life of this old yew. I found it still green and vigorous, carefully guarded within an iron rail, and likely to see many changing seasons come and go long after all human beings now upon the face of the earth have passed to "the land where all things are forgotten." It stands a grim sentinel in the churchyard, watching the unceasing harvest gathered in, faster even than its own leaves fall. Inside the church there are records of

men who died five hundred years and more ago, but the yew was a venerable tree even then.

I stood for a moment or two looking at an effigy of John de Darley, dated 1325. A little girl, the sexton's child, stepped up to me and said, "It is John de Darley, sir. He died with his 'art in his 'and."

"With his what, my child?" said I, all in the dark as to her meaning.

"With his 'art in's 'and," repeated the girl. "He was a crusader, and that was how he died."

The figure holds in its hand some object resembling a heart, and this has given rise to the belief that the crusader took the precaution to remove that portion of his frame ere laying down his arms for ever. Presently the sexton's daughter ran off to join a group which surrounded an organ-man outside. He was playing an air from Sonnambula, and somehow or other it had a strangely foreign sound among those fields and hills. The boys demanded the air over again, and seemed impatient of a refusal. I said a few words to the biggest of them, who was about eight years old, and he nobly took the organ-grinder under his immediate personal protection." They shan't hurt him," said he; and from that moment the Italian's life was safe. Then I found a way by the side of the river to Rowsley, and so back to Chatsworth, where, at the very gates of the Park -a Park of which it is impossible ever to grow wearythere is one of the most comfortable hotels in England, close to the pretty village of Edensor. If all hotels were like this one, how little temptation there would ever be to