MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
through the annual "Grasmere play," which is her creation, to maintain the rich old dialect of the dales—there were two Grasmere men in the Navy, two soldiers in the Regular army, and three Reservists—out of a total male population of all ages of three hundred and eighty-nine. No one ever saw a soldier, and wages, as all over the north, were high. There was some perplexity of mind among the dale-folk when war broke out. France and Belgium seemed a long way off—more than "t'oother side o' Kendal," a common measure of distance in the mind of the old folks, whose schooling lies far behind them; and fighting seemed a strange thing to these men of peace. " What!—there'll be nea fightin'!" said an old man in the village, the day before war was declared. "There 's nea blacks amongst 'em [meaning the Germans]—they'se civilised beings!" But the fighting came, and Grasmere did as Grasmere did in 1803, when Pitt called for volunteers for Home Defence. "At Grasmere," wrote Wordsworth, "we have turned out almost to a man." Last year, within a few months of the outbreak of war, seventy young men from the village offered themselves to the army; over fifty are serving. Their women left behind have been steadily knitting and sewing since they left. Every man from Grasmere got a Christmas present of two pairs of socks. Two sisters, washerwomen, and hard worked, made a pair each, in four consecutive weeks, getting up at four in the morning to knit. Day after day, women from the village have gone up to the fells to gather the absorbent spjiagnum moss, which they dry and clean, and send to a manufacturing chemist to be prepared for hospital use. Half a ton of feather-weight moss has been collected and cleaned by women and school-children. One old woman who could not give money gathered the tufts of wool which the sheep leave behind them on the brambles and fern, washed them, and made them into the little pillows which prop wounded limbs in hospital. The cottages and farms send eggs every week to the wounded in France. The school-children alone bring fifty a week. One woman, whose main resource was her fowls, offered twelve eggs a week; which meant starving herself. And all the time, two pence, three pence, six pence a week was
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