At the head of the Lake we got in a boat and rowed across Derwentwater to the tiny bay at the foot of Catbells.  There we landed, shouldered our burdens, and set out over the mountains and the passes, and for a week we enjoyed the richest solitude this country can offer.  We followed no cut-and-dried programme.  I love to draw up programmes for a walking tour, but I love still better to break them.  For one of the joys of walking is the sense of freedom it gives you.  You are tied to no time-table, the slave of no road, the tributary of no man.  If you like the road you follow it; if you choose the pass that is yours also; if your fancy (and your wind) is for the mountain tops, then over Great Gable and Scawfell, Robinson and Helvellyn be your way.  Every short cut is for you, and every track is the path of adventure.  The stream that tumbles down the mountain side is your wine cup.  You kneel on the boulders, bend your head, and take such draughts as only the healthy thirst of the mountains can give.  And then, on your way again singing:—­

    Bed in the bush with the stars to see. 
    Bread I dip in the river—­
    There’s the life for a man like me. 
    There’s the life for ever.

What liberty is there like this?  You have cut your moorings from the world, you are far from telegraphs and newspapers and all the frenzies of the life you have left behind you, you are alone with the lonely hills and the wide sky and the elemental things that have been from the beginning and will outlast all the tortured drama of men.  The very sounds of life—­the whistle of the curlew, the bleating of the mountain sheep—­add to the sense of primeval solitude.  To these sounds the crags have echoed for a thousand and ten thousand years; to these sounds and to the rushing of the winds and the waters they will echo ten thousand years hence.  It is as though you have passed out of time into eternity, where a thousand years are as one day.  There is no calendar for this dateless world.  The buzzard that you have startled from its pool in the gully and that circles round with wide-flapping wings has a lineage as ancient as the hills, and the vision of the pikes of Langdale that bursts on you as you reach the summit of Esk hause is the same vision that burst on the first savage who adventured into these wild fastnesses of the mountains.

And then as the sun begins to slope to the west you remember that, if you are among immortal things, you are only a mortal yourself, that you are getting footsore, and that you need a night’s lodging and the comforts of an inn.  Whither shall we turn?  The valleys call us on every side.  Newlands wide vale we can reach, or cheerful Borrowdale, or lonely Ennerdale, or—­yes, to-night we will sup at Wastdale, at the jolly old inn that Auld Will Ritson used to keep, that inn sacred to the cragsman, where on New Year’s Eve the gay company of climbers foregather from their brave deeds on the mountains and talk of hand-holds and foot-holds and sing the song of “The rope, the rope,” and join in the chorus as the landlord trolls out: