in the cottage of a Mrs. Dove. The White Lion was "full up," but the landlady secured us rooms in her mother's house near by. We go over to the inn for our dinners, and take our luncheons and teas wherever we happen to be. I have been trying to get you a photograph of this tiny cottage, set about with nasturtiums, marigolds, and all sorts of old-fashioned flowers, but you know that I have never been much of a success as a photographer.

July 29th.

This afternoon we started a full hour before the coach, that was to pick us up on the road, and walked all around the little village of Ambleside, by Harriet Martineau's cottage, the Knoll, which is covered over with vines and has a pretty garden beside it. Here it was that she entertained Charlotte Brontë upon her second visit to the lakes. The two literary ladies seem to have spent a week or more together in great peace and happiness, writing in their separate rooms during the morning and meeting in the afternoons and evenings for walks and talks. A perfectly ideal way of making a visit, is it not? These English people, probably from long practice, have elevated the giving and receiving of visits to a fine art; we might learn much from

them! In a letter written from the Knoll, Miss Brontë says that "although Miss Martineau was not without her peculiarities, her good and noble qualities far outweighed her defects." They were at one in their enthusiastic admiration for the Duke of Wellington and upon many other subjects; but the hostess with all her "absolutism" failed to convert the resolute little Yorkshire lady to her own ardent faith in mesmerism. A little further along the stage road, at the foot of Nab Scar, is Nab Cottage, a long, low vine-covered building with a porch in front. Here De Quincey lived for some years, and here Hartley Coleridge, the "Li'le Hartley" beloved of the lake folk, lived and died.

The feeling about Hartley Coleridge is curiously strong among the simple country people. When Dean Rawnsley asked whether Mr. Wordsworth and Hartley were not great friends, the answer was very much in the latter's favor. "He [Mr. Wordsworth] was a cleverish man, but he wasn't set much count of by noan of us. He lent Hartley a deal of his books, it's certain, but Hartley helped him a great deal, I understand, did best part of his poems for him, so the sayin' is. Na na, I doan't think Li'le Hartley ever set much by him, never was friendly, I doubt. Ye see, he [Mr. Words

worth] was so hard upon him, so very hard upon him, giv' him so much hard preaachin' about his waays." Wordsworth and his poetry were doubtless both quite beyond the understanding of the dalesmen, not for "sich as us," as they expressed it, "noan o' us very fond on 'im; eh, dear! quite a different man from Li'le Hartley. He wasn't a man as was very companionable, ye kna."

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One practical mark the poet has left upon the vale, which the country folk seem to appreciate. He had his own fancy about chimneys. As one of the cottagers said, "Wudsworth liked a bit of colour in them. I 'member he and the Doctor [Arnold] had great arguments about the chimleys time we was building Fox How, and Wudsworth sed he liked a bit o' colour in 'em. And that the chimley coigns sud be natural headed and natural bedded, a little red and a little yaller. For there is a bit of colour in the quarry stone up Easedale way." And so many of the chimney stacks up Rydal way are built according to the poet's fancy, and a charming fancy it was! I have never realized how much beauty there can be in chimney stacks until this summer when I have seen so much of rural England.

The chimneys are picturesque as well as

everything else about Dove Cottage, but how tiny it is! The master must have had to bend his tall head to enter his own doorway.

In 1807 De Quincey visited the cottage, which was originally an inn with the sign of "The Dove and Olive Bough." His description of "the little white cottage gleaming among trees' is not untrue to its appearance to-day. Here is the same diamond-paned window looking out on the road and all embowered with roses and jasmine. This window belonged to Dorothy's ground-floor chamber, where are still the articles of furniture used by her and brought from Rydal Mount after Mrs. Wordsworth's death. On the floor above is the bedroom of the master and mistress, the little parlor consecrated as the poet's study by its three hundred volumes, and beyond it the tiny guest-chamber, added just before Sir Walter and Lady Scott visited the Wordsworths in 1805.

"I was," wrote De Quincey after his first visit to Dove Cottage, which was destined to be his own home for many years, "ushered up a little flight of stairs, fourteen in all, to a little drawing room, or whatever the reader chooses to call it. It was not fully seven feet six inches high, and in other respects pretty nearly of the same dimensions as the hall below."