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An excerpt from the first essay. The leaves are falling fast, for a spell of wet weather has been followed by frosty nights, though the days are bright and warm still, and the mellow autumnal tints glow in the sunshine. At the farm, which is perched on the highest point of the moor, not a sound is to be heard, the men-folk being all at work in the fields. The farmstead is in good order, old though it is, for its stone walls were solidly built, they are thick, and all the timber used was oak, well seasoned. So substantial was the work that, with the exception of a few necessary repairs about some of the outbuildings, all is in nearly the same condition in which it was left by the owners, long dead, who caused it to be built so many generations ago. The land also is to all appearance just what it was when the site of the farm was chosen. What was suited for cultivation was planted then, and the rest left wild, as it still remains, close to the solid path or track that leads from the woods up to the farm; and halfway up the rush-grown hillside is a bog into which it would be a sorry business to stray. Cattle avoid it by instinct; no hoof-prints are ever seen round that soft place. Never a moor without its trout stream, or streams, which flow at its foot, cutting sharp runs where, in the course of years, all the earthy matter has been washed away, leaving at last a bottom of clean, sharp sand and bright washed stones. You can hear the swirl and the splash where it runs through the copse-growth of the moor-side, and see the glistening of the pure bright water where it turns into the meadows, as it continually pursues its course from the hills and moors above down to the moors below; hidden here and there by thorns and brambles, giant 'kexes, ' thistles, ferns, and all the other growth common to wild lands....

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