Up from the valley came drowsy sounds that tell the wane of day, and please the ear of evening as she draws her curtains over the world.  A woman’s voice floated up from the pastures of an old farm-house, below where I sat, calling the cattle home.  The barking of dogs sounded clear in different parts of the vale, and about scattered hamlets, on the hill sides.  I could hear the far-off prattle of a company of girls, mingled with the lazy joltings of a cart, the occasional crack of a whip, and the surly call of a driver to his horses, upon the high road, half a mile below me.  From a wooded slope, on the opposite side of the valley, the crack of a gun came, waking the echoes for a minute; and then all seemed to sink into a deeper stillness than before, and the dreamy surge of sound broke softer and softer upon the shores of evening, as daylight sobered down.  High above the green valley, on both sides, the moorlands stretched away in billowy wildernesses—­dark, bleak, and almost soundless, save where the wind harped his wild anthem upon the heathery waste, and where roaring streams filled the lonely cloughs with drowsy uproar.  It was a striking scene, and it was an impressive hour.  The bold, round, flat-topped height of Musbury Tor stood gloomily proud, on the opposite side, girdled off from the rest of the hills by a green vale.  The lofty outlines of Aviside and Holcombe were glowing with the gorgeous hues of a cloudless October sunset.  Along those wild ridges the soldiers of ancient Rome marched from Manchester to Preston, when boars and wolves ranged the woods and thickets of the Irwell valley.  The stream is now lined all the way with busy populations, and evidences of great wealth and enterprise.  But the spot from which I looked down upon it was still naturally wild.  The hand of man had left no mark there, except the grass-grown pack-horse road.  There was no sound nor sign of life immediately around me.

The wind was cold, and daylight was dying down.  It was getting too near dark to go by the moor tops, so I made off towards a cottage in the next clough, where an old quarry-man lived, called “Jone o’Twilter’s.”  The pack-horse road led by the place.  Once there, I knew that I could spend a pleasant hour with the old folk, and, after that, be directed by a short cut down to the great highway in the valley, from whence an hour’s walk would bring me near home.  I found the place easily, for I had been there in summer.  It was a substantial stone-built cottage, or little farm-house, with mullioned windows.  A stone-seated porch, white-washed inside, shaded the entrance; and there was a little barn and a shippon, or cow-house attached.  By the by, that word “shippon,” must have been originally “sheep-pen.”  The house nestled deep in the clough, upon a shelf of green land, near the moorland stream.  On a rude ornamental stone, above the threshold of the porch, the date of the building was quaintly carved, “1696,” with the initials, “J.