[Illustration: BORROWDALE AND SEATHWAITE]
It was a lonely place where the four yew trees stood, though not far
from the old black lead works which at one time produced the finest
plumbago for lead pencils in the world. As the rain was falling heavily,
we lit a fire under the largest of the four trees, which measured about
twenty-one feet in circumference at four feet from the ground, and
sheltered under its venerable shade for about an hour, watching a
much-swollen streamlet as it rolled down the side of a mountain.
Near the yew trees there was a stream which we had to cross, as our next
stage was over the fells to Grasmere; but when we came to its swollen
waters, which we supposed came from "Glaramara's inmost Caves," they
were not "murmuring" as Wordsworth described them, but coming with a
rush and a roar, and to our dismay we found the bridge broken down and
portions of it lying in the bed of the torrent. We thought of a stanza
in a long-forgotten ballad:
London Bridge is broken down!
Derry derry down, derry derry down!
Luckily we found a footbridge lower down the stream. It was now
necessary to inquire our way at one of the isolated farms in the
neighbourhood of Borrowdale, where the people knew very little of what
was going on in the world outside their own immediate environs.
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