122 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



and others said that the owners objected to the 

 ground being broken up ! I also asked several farmers 

 why they did not cut bracken, which was plentiful 

 enough, to serve as bedding for the cows, since they 

 could not get straw. They answered that occasionally 

 a farmer did so, but it was not the custom and they 

 thought the cows did just as well without any bedding 

 at all ! 



I pitied the cows ; but perhaps they were right ; it 

 may well be that the domestic animals, like their 

 masters, have become adapted during many genera- 

 tions to a starvation land, to lie in winter on a hard 

 cold stone floor and to keep alive on the smallest 

 amount of food of the poorest kind, and yet to flourish 

 in a way and yield milk. 



But though they appear to be a contented, they are 

 not a happy-looking or a lively people. They have 

 colourless faces and for good looks or brightness or 

 intelligence compare badly with the inhabitants of the 

 adjoining districts and with the people of England 

 generally, north and south. The children are naturally 

 more attractive than the adults ; they have the bright- 

 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 



