seemed palatial to those rustic clerics of the past from whose
ministrations the lonely valley had drawn its spiritual sustenance
in times gone by. They, indeed, had belonged to another race--a
race sprung from the soil and content to spend the whole of life
in very close contact and very homely intercourse with their mother
earth. Mr. Thornburgh, who had come to the valley only a few years
before from a parish in one of the large manufacturing towns, and
who had no inherited interest in the Cumbrian folk and their ways,
had only a very faint idea, and that a distinctly depreciatory one,
of what these mythical predecessors of his, with their strange
social status and unbecoming occupations, might be like. But there
were one or two old men still lingering in the dale who could have
told him a great deal about them, whose memory went back to the
days when the relative social importance of the dale parsons was
exactly expressed by the characteristic Westmoreland saying: 'Ef
ye'll nobbut send us a gude schulemeaster, a verra' moderate parson
'ull dea!' and whose slow minds, therefore, were filled with a
strong inarticulate sense of difference as they saw him pass along
the road, and recalled the incumbent of their childhood, dropping
in for his 'crack' and his glass of 'yale' at this or that farm-house
on any occasion of local festivity, or driving his sheep to Whinborough
market with his own hands like any other peasant of the dale.

Within the last twenty years, however, the few remaining survivors
of this primitive clerical order in the Westmoreland and Cumberland
valleys have dropped into their quiet, unremembered graves, and new
men of other ways and other modes of speech reign in their stead.
And as at Long Whindale, so almost everywhere, the change has been
emphasized by the disappearance of the old parsonage houses with
their stone floors, their parlors lustrous with oak carving on chest