In the place of this solid erection there stood, a few years ago, an externally similar, though larger pile containing a chamber, which formed a welcome shelter to such shepherds and tourists as happened to be overtaken on the mountain by bad weather. This chambered pile was pulled down by certain officers employed on the trigonometrical survey, or rather by their orders; and, by the bye, I have heard that the labourer who undertook the demolition had five pounds for the job, and earned the satisfactory wages of somewhere near one pound per hour by it. Be this as it may, those gentlemen ought, when they restored the erection, to have made the new equal in all respects to the old one, instead of giving us a pile inferior both in its useful and ornamental attributes. Any erection of this description on a hill-top being locally called a “man,” this is said by certain shallow etymologists to give the _Old_ Man his name, as though a mountain of his respectability would stand unchristened, until somebody, like the “three rosy-cheeked school-boys, the tallest not more than the height of a counsellor’s bag,” in the Laureate's poem on “Perseverance” (I believe), undertook and completed the task of rearing a pile of stones upon his vertex. The Rev. W. Ford, who has written one of the many “Guides to the Lakes,” says there are three piles on the mountain top—“the Old Man, his wife, and son,” thereby inferring that the name of the hill bears some allusion to the featherless biped of similar designation. This is certainly wide of the mark, but there are two reasonable derivations of this mountain’s quaint appellative, and both are probably correct. Some say the name comes from two British or Saxon words _Alt_, high, and _Maen_, crag or rocky hill, which pretty well describe the Old Man. Others say that the same Roman soldiery who called their beautiful station at the head of Windermere _Amabilis Situs_ (since degenerated into Ambleside), called this hill _Altus Mons_, which, by a natural metonomy, gradually became _Auld Man_, for, be it remembered, the natives of this immediate vicinage, even at the present day, pronounce _old_ in the Scotch fashion.