Mr.Thornburgh, who had come to the valley only a few years before from a parish in one of the large manufacturing towns, and who had no inherited interest in the Cumbrian folk and their ways, had only a very faint idea, and that a distinctly depreciatory one, of what these mythical predecessors of his, with their strange social status and unbecoming occupations, might be like.

But there were one or two old men still lingering in the dale who could have told him a great deal about them, whose memory went back to the days when the relative social importance of the dale parsons was exactly expressed by the characteristic Westmoreland saying: 'Ef ye'll nobbut send us a gude schulemeaster, a verra' moderate parson 'ull dea!' and whose slow minds, therefore, were filled with a strong inarticulate sense of difference as they saw him pass along the road, and recalled the incumbent of their childhood, dropping in for his 'crack' and his glass of 'yale' at this or that farm-house on any occasion of local festivity, or driving his sheep to Whinborough market with his own hands like any other peasant of the dale.
Within the last twenty years, however, the few remaining survivors of this primitive clerical order in the Westmoreland and Cumberland valleys have dropped into their quiet, unremembered graves, and new men of other ways and other modes of speech reign in their stead.

And as at Long Whindale, so almost everywhere, the change has been emphasized by the disappearance of the old parsonage houses with their stone floors, their parlors lustrous with oak carving on chest or dresser, and their encircling farm-buildings and meadows, in favor of an upgrowth of new trim mansions designed to meet the needs, not of peasants, but of gentlefolks.
And naturally the churches too have shared in the process of transformation.

The ecclesiastical revival of the last half-century has worried its will even in the remotest corners of the Cambrian country, and soon not a vestige of the homely worshipping-places of an earlier day will remain.

Across the road, in front of the Long Whindale parsonage, for instance, rose a freshly built church, also peaked and gabled, with a spire and two bells and a painted east window, and Heaven knows what novelties besides.