122 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



if any romance, any enthusiasm, exists it is bound 

 to show itself. They were too serious — they were 

 even solemn, and gave one the idea that they had 

 all been recently converted to Methodism and were 

 afraid to smile or to say a frivolous or unnecessary 

 word lest it should be set down against them by an 

 invisible recording clerk, standing, pen behind his 

 ear, at their elbow, intently listening. There was no 

 trace of that fiery spirit, that intensity of life, that 

 passion for music, sport, drinking and fighting, for 

 something good or bad which distinguishes their 

 very next-door neighbours, the Lancastrians. What 

 is it then — the soil, the altitude and bleak climate, 

 the hard conditions of life, or what? One knows of 

 other districts where life is just as hard, where the 

 people have yet some brightness of mind, some 

 energy, some passion in them. I gave it up; there 

 was no time for brooding over such problems; my 

 quest was birds, not men. 



Moreover, now at the end of May the first unmis- 

 takable signs of spring were becoming visible on that 

 lofty moor of a hard and desolate aspect which I had 

 made my home. Frosts and fogs and cold winds were 

 not so persistent; there were better intervals; then 

 came a beautiful warm day — the first fine really 

 warm day, the natives proudly assured me, which 

 they had experienced since the previous August. 

 The little stone-enclosed fields had taken a livelier 

 green, and on wet spots and by the burns the shin- 

 ing yellow marsh-marigolds were in bloom. But the 

 chief change to spring on the high wintry moor was 



