The History of David Grieve | Page 2

whistling and looking.
'They can't see t' Downfall from Stockport to-day,' he was saying to
himself; 'it's coomin ower like mad.'
Some distance away in front of him, beyond the undulating heather
ground at his feet, rose a magnificent curving front of moor, the steep
sides of it crowned with black edges and cliffs of grit, the outline of the
south-western end sweeping finely up on the right to a purple peak, the
king of all the moorland round. No such colour as clothed that bronzed
and reddish wall of rock, heather, and bilberry is known to
Westmoreland, hardly to Scotland; it seems to be the peculiar property
of that lonely and inaccessible district which marks the mountainous
centre of mid-England--the district of Kinder Scout and the High Peak.
Before the boy's ranging eye spread the whole western rampart of the
Peak--to the right, the highest point, of Kinder Low, to the left, 'edge'

behind 'edge,' till the central rocky mass sank and faded towards the
north into milder forms of green and undulating hills. In the very centre
of the great curve a white and surging mass of water cleft the mountain
from top to bottom, falling straight over the edge, here some two
thousand feet above the sea, and roaring downward along an almost
precipitous bed into the stream--the Kinder--which swept round the hill
on which the boy was standing, and through the valley behind him. In
ordinary times the 'Downfall,' as the natives call it, only makes itself
visible on the mountain-side as a black ravine of tossed and tumbled
rocks. But there had been a late snowfall on the high plateau beyond,
followed by heavy rain, and the swollen stream was to-day worthy of
its grand setting of cliff and moor. On such occasions it becomes a
landmark for all the country round, for the cotton-spinning centres of
New Mills and Stockport, as well as for the grey and scattered farms
which climb the long backs of moorland lying between the Peak and
the Cheshire border.
To-day, also, after the snow and rains of early April, the air was clear
again. The sun was shining; a cold, dry wind was blowing; there were
sounds of spring in the air, and signs of it on the thorns and larches. Far
away on the boundary wall of the farmland a cuckoo was sitting, his
long tail swinging behind him, his monotonous note filling the valley;
and overhead a couple of peewits chased each other in the pale, windy
blue.
The keen air, the sun after the rain, sent life and exhilaration through
the boy's young limbs. He leapt from the wall, and raced back down the
field, his dogs streaming behind him, the sheep, with their newly
dropped lambs, shrinking timidly to either side as he passed. He made
for a corner in the wall, vaulted it on to the moor, crossed a rough dam
built in the stream for sheep-washing purposes, jumped in and out of
the two grey-walled sheep-pens beyond, and then made leisurely for a
spot in the brook--not the Downfall stream, but the Red Brook, one of
its westerly affluents--where he had left a miniature water-wheel at
work the day before. Before him and around him spread the brown
bosom of Kinder Scout; the cultivated land was left behind; here on all
sides, as far as the eye could see, was the wild home of heather and

plashing water, of grouse and peewit, of cloud and breeze.
The little wheel, shaped from a block of firwood, was turning merrily
under a jet of water carefully conducted to it from a neighbouring fall.
David went down on hands and knees to examine it. He made some
little alteration in the primitive machinery of it, his fingers touching it
lightly and neatly, and then, delighted with the success of it, he called
Louie to come and look.
Louie was sitting a few yards further up the stream, crooning to herself
as she swung to and fro, and snatching every now and then at some
tufts of primroses growing near her, which she wrenched away with a
hasty, wasteful hand, careless, apparently, whether they reached her lap
or merely strewed the turf about her with their torn blossoms. When
David called her she gathered up the flowers anyhow in her apron, and
dawdled towards him, leaving a trail of them behind her. As she
reached him, however, she was struck by a book sticking out of his
pocket, and, stooping over him, with a sudden hawk-like gesture, as he
sprawled head downwards, she tried to get hold of it.
But he felt her movement. 'Let goo!' he said imperiously, and, throwing
himself round, while one foot slipped into the water, he caught her
hand, with its thin predatory fingers,