She was a widow, and kept a confectionery shop, and ’did a deal of
  baking,’ he believed.

Secondly, that there was a little patch of garden at the back of the house, with a famous spring well—­still called Old Betty’s Well—­in it, and that only a few paces from where I was then standing by the pollard ash.

On jumping over the fence I found myself on the western side of the quaint old Church Hill House, with magnificent views of the whole of the western side of Hawkshead Vale; grassy swell and wooded rises taking the eye up to the moorland ridge between us and Coniston.

‘But,’ said I, ‘what about Betty’s Well.’  ‘Oh,’ said my friend, ’that’s a noted spring, that never freezes, and always runs; we all drink of it, and neighbours send to it.  Here it is,’ he continued; and, gazing down, I saw a little dripping well of water, lustrous, clear, coming evidently in continuous force from the springs or secret channels up hill, pausing for a moment at the trough, thence falling into a box or ‘channel paved by man’s officious care,’ and in a moment out of sight and soundless, to pursue its way, ’stripped of its voice,’ towards the main Town beck, that ran at the north-east border of the garden plot.  ‘Ha, pretty prisoner,’ and the words ‘dimple down’ came to my mind at once as appropriate.  ’Old Betty’s Well gave the key-note of the ‘famous brook’; and ‘boxed within our garden’ seemed an appropriate and exact description.

Trace of
’the sunny seat
Round the stone table under the dark pine,’

was there none.  Not so, however, the Ash tree, the remains of which I
have spoken of.  From the bedroom of Betty Braithwaite’s house the boy
could have watched the moon,

’while to and fro
In the dark summit of the waving tree
She rocked with every impulse of the breeze.’

‘In old times,’ said my friend, ’the wall fence ran across the garden,
just beyond this spring well, so you see it was but a small spot, was
this garden close.’  Yes; but the

’crowd of things
About its narrow precincts all beloved,’

were known the better, and loved the more on that account.  Certainly, thought I to myself, here is the famous spring; a brook that Wordsworth must have known, and that may have been the centre of memory to him in his description of those early Hawkshead days, with its metaphor of fountain life.

May we not, as we gaze on this little fountain well, in a garden plot
at the back of one of the grey huts of this ‘one dear vale,’ point as
with a wand, and say,

    ’This portion of the river of his mind
    Came from yon fountain.’

  Is it not possible that the old dame whose

    ’Clear though shallow stream of piety,
    Ran on the Sabbath days a fresher course,’

  was Betty Braithwaite, the aged dame who owned the cottage hard by?”