122 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



ness proper to their time of life, which makes their 

 dirty little faces shine; but it is rare to find a pretty 

 one. What has made this people of the Peak what 

 they are, so unlike their neighbours, so wholly absorbed 

 in their own affairs and oblivious of the world outside; 

 mentally isolated, like the inhabitants of a lonely island? 

 It was a depressing experience to converse with youths 

 and young men of an age when 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 frivo- 

 lous 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 



