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"Ah," said Adam softly, "I often think about it too; the old house among the ash trees, and the Herdwicks feeding on the long slope behind. The red heath on the fell-top and the beck bubbling in the ghyll. Everything's clean and cool in the quiet dale, and the folk are calm and Slow."
Anthony had never seen his father, who had died one night, upon the fell-top, he and his shepherd, engulfed in the great snowstorm of 1849. Folks had said that he was the only Garstin who had failed to make old man's bones. After his death, Jake Atkinson, from Ribblehead in Yorkshire, had come to live at Hootsey.
Many a day, oop on t' fell-top, t' thought o' ye's nigh driven me daft, and I've left my shepherdin' jest t' set on a cairn in t' mist, picturin' an' broodin' on yer face. Many an evenin' I've started oop t' vicarage, wi' t' resolution t' speak right oot t' ye; but when it coomed t' point, a sort o' timidity seemed t' hould me back, I was that feared t' displease ye.
A stampede of huddled sheep, wildly scampering over the slaty shingle, emerged from the leaden mist that muffled the fell-top, and a shrill shepherd's whistle broke the damp stillness of the air. And presently a man's figure appeared, following the sheep down the hillside.
In a mild and steady light, which came from no illumination of moon or stars, but seemed to be interfused with the air, in the strong warm wind which wrapped the fell-top; upon a sward of bent-grass which ran toward the tarn and ended in swept reeds he saw six young women dancing in a ring.
He and Henry Sisson stacked the hay in the yard behind the house; there was no further mention made of Rosa Blencarn; but all day long Anthony, as he knelt thatching the rick, brooded over the strange sweetness of her face, and on the fell-top, while he tramped after the ewes over the dry, crackling heather, and as he jogged along the narrow, rickety road, driving his cartload of lambs into the auction mart.
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