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The searching party, reinforced by most of the able-bodied men in Ratlinghope, beat that part of the hill lying between Ratlinghope and Wolstaston thoroughly, thinking that I must be somewhere in the tract between the two places, never supposing that I could have wandered as far away as I actually had done.

Almost unseen in a narrow valley at the foot of the mountain, stand the village and church of Ratlinghope, the centre of a parish numbering about three hundred souls only, but which stretches over miles of mountain country, embracing a portion of the wild mining district of the Stiper Stones.

The morning service at Wolstaston on Sunday the 29th was of necessity but thinly attended, and it seemed probable that I should not even be expected at Ratlinghope.

A little girl now ventured to approach me, as, true to the instincts of her nature, the idea dawned upon her that I was no goblin of the mountains, no disagreeable thing from a world beneath popped up through the snow, but a real fellow-creature in distress. I spoke to her and told her that I was the clergyman of Ratlinghope, and had been lost in the snow on the hill all night.

Beyond these hills the eye passes to the Welsh mountains, and rests at last on the grand peaks of Cader Idris in one direction, and Snowdon in the other, which may be seen in clear weather sharply defined against a sunset sky. Poor Ratlinghope was in sore need of some one to look after it when the living was offered to me in September 1856.