I20 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



heather, bilberry, and coarse bog grasses — a habitation 

 of birds. 



Few persons hve on this high moor; the farms are 

 not visible until you get to the edge of it and can look 

 down on the slopes below and the valleys, where the 

 small cottage-like stone farmhouses are seen sprinkled 

 over the earth, each with its few little green fields walled 

 round with stone. They are the meanest-looking, most 

 unhomelike farms you will find in England, for they 

 have no gardens, few or no shade trees, and there is 

 no sign of cultivation anywhere. From one side, look- 

 ing towards Leek, I counted twenty-six farms, and at 

 not one of them did they grow a potato or a cabbage 

 or a flower; and if you go all round the hill you could 

 count two or three hundred farms like these. Each 

 one has its stone-fenced fields, on which a few cows 

 feed, and, if the summer is not too cold, a little hay 

 is made for the winter. It is all the cattle get, as there 

 are no roots. The sheep, if any are kept, are up on 

 the moor, a long-woolled, horned animal with black 

 spotted face and looking all black from its habit of 

 lying in the peat holes. They are not in flocks and 

 are not folded, but live on the moor in small parties 

 of two or three to half a dozen. The farmers depend 

 mainly on their lean ill-fed cows for a livelihood; they 

 make butter and feed a pig or two with the skim milk. 

 They live on bacon and buttermilk themselves, and 

 bread which they make or buy, but vegetables and fruit 

 are luxuries. To one from almost any other part of 

 the country it seems a miserable existence, yet the 



