fields, perhaps, are often divided by dry stone walls, on which, when they
have become old, curious plants may sometimes be found. For the flora,
too, is distinct; you may find herbs here that do not exist a little way
off, and on the other hand, search how you will, you will not discover one
single specimen of a simple flower which strews the meadows elsewhere.

Here the very farmhouses are built upon a different plan, and with
different materials; the barns are covered with old stone slates, instead
of tiles or thatch. The people are a nation amongst themselves. Their
accent is peculiar and easily recognised, and they have their own
folklore, their own household habits, particular dainties, and way of
life. The tenant farmers, the millers, the innkeepers, and every Hodge
within 'the uplands' (not by any means all hills)--in short, every one is
a citizen of Fleeceborough. Hodge may tend his flock on distant pastures,
may fodder his cattle in far-away meadows, and dwell in little hamlets
hardly heard of, but all the same he is a Fleeceborough man. It is his
centre; thither he looks for everything.

The place is a little market town, the total of whose population in the
census records sounds absurdly small; yet it is a complete world in
itself; a capital city, with its kingdom and its ruler, for the territory
is practically the property of a single family. Enter Fleeceborough by
whichever route you will, the first object that fixes the attention is an
immensely high and endless wall. If you come by carriage one way, you
skirt it for a long distance; if you come the other, you see it as you
pass through the narrow streets every now and then at the end of them,
closing the prospect and overtopping the lesser houses. By railway it is
conspicuous from the windows; and if you walk about the place, you
continually come upon it. It towers up perpendicular and inaccessible,
like the curtain wall of an old fortification: here and there the upper