SHEFFIELD AND ITS INDIVIDUALITY--THE COUNTRY, ABOVE GROUND AND UNDER
GROUND--WAKEFIELD AND LEEDS--WHARF VALE--FARNLEY HALL--HARROGATE;
RIPLEY CASTLE; RIPON; CONSERVATISM OF COUNTRY TOWNS--FOUNTAIN ABBEY;
STUDLEY PARK--RIEVAULX ABBEY--LORD FAVERSHAM'S SHORT-HORN STOCK.
From Chatsworth I went on to Sheffield, crossing a hilly moorland
belonging to the Duke of Rutland, and containing 10,000 acres in one
solid block. It was all covered with heather, and kept in this
wild, bleak condition for game. Here and there well-cultivated
farms, as it were, bit into this cold waste, rescuing large, square
morsels of land, and making them glow with the warm flush and glory
of luxuriant harvests; thus showing how such great reaches of desert
may be made to blossom like the rose under the hand of human labor.
Here is Sheffield, down here, sweltering, smoking, and sweating,
with face like the tan, under the walls of these surrounding hills.
Here live and labor Briareus and Cyclops of modern mythology. Here
they--
Swing their heavy sledge,
With measured beats and slow;
Like the sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
Here live the lineal descendants of Thor, christianised to human
industries. Here the great hammer of the Scandinavian Thunderer
descended, took nest, and hatched a brood of ten thousand little
iron beetles for beating iron and steel into shapes and uses that
Tubal Cain never dreamed of. Here you may hear their clatter night
and day upon a thousand anvils. O, Vale of Vulcan! O, Valley of
Knives! Was ever a boy put into trousers, in either hemisphere,
that did not carry in the first pocket made for him one of thy cheap
blades? Did ever a reaper in the Old World or New cut and bind a
sheaf of grain, who did not wield one of thy famous sickles? All
Americans who were boys forty years ago, will remember three English
centres of peculiar interest to them. These were Sheffield,
Colebrook Dale, and Paternoster Row. There was hardly a house or
log cabin between the Penobscot and the Mississippi which could not
show the imprint of these three places, on the iron tea-kettle, the
youngest boy's Barlow knife, and his younger sister's picture-book.
To the juvenile imagination of those times, Sheffield was a huge
jack-knife, Colebrook Dale a porridge-pot, and Paternoster Row a
psalm-book, each in the generative case. How we young reapers used
to discuss the comparative merits and meanings of those mysterious
letters on our sickles, B.Y and I.R! What were they? Were they
beginnings of words, or whole words themselves? Did they stand for
things, qualities, or persons? "Mine is a _By_ sickle; mine is an
_Ir_ one. Mine is the best," says the last, "for it has the finest
teeth and the best curve." That was our boys' talk in walking
through the rye, with bent backs and red faces, a little behind our
fathers; who cut a wider work to enable us to keep near them.
In what blacksmith shop or hardware house in America does not
Sheffield show its face and faculties? Did any American, knowing
the difference between cast-iron and cast-steel, ever miss the sight
of Naylor and Sanderson's yellow labels in his travels? How many
millions of acres of primeval forest have the ages edged with their
fine steel cut through, and given to the plough! Fashion has its
Iron Age as well as its Golden; and, what is more remarkable, the
first of the two has come last, in the fitful histories of custom.
And this last freak of feminine taste has brought a wonderful grist
of additional business to the Sheffield mill. The fair Eugenie has
done a good thing for this smoky town, well deserving of a monument
of burnished steel erected to her memory on one of these hills.
More than this; as Empress of Crinoline, she should wear the iron
crown of Charlemagne in her own right. Her husband's empire is but
a mere arondissement compared with the domain that does homage to
her sceptre. Sheffield is the great arsenal of her armaments.
Sheffield cases ships of war with iron plates a foot thick; but that
is nothing, in pounds avoirdupois, compared with the weight of steel
it spins into elastic springs for casing the skirts of two hundred
millions of the fair Eugenie's sex and lieges in the two
hemispheres. It is estimated that ten thousand tons of steel are
annually absorbed into this use in Christendom; and Sheffield,
doubtless, furnishes a large proportion of it.
Here I had another involuntary walk, not put down in the programme
of my expectations. On inquiring the way to Fir Vale, a picturesque
suburb where a friend resided, I was directed to a locality which,
it was suggested, must be the one I meant, though it was called Fir
View. I followed the direction given for a considerable distance,
when it was varied successively by persons of whom I occasionally
inquired. After ascending and descending a number of steep hills, I
suddenly came down upon the town again from the south, having made a
complete circuit of it; a performance that cost me about two hours
of time and much unsatisfactory perspiration. Fearing that a second
attempt would be equally unsuccessful, I took the Leeds road, and
left the Jericho at the first round. Walked about nine miles to a
furnace-lighted village called very appropriately Hoyland, or
Highland, when anglicised from the Danish. It commands truly a
grand view of wooded hills and deep valleys dashed with the sheen of
ripened grain.
The next day I passed through a good sample section of England's
wealth and industry. Mansions and parks of the gentry, hill,
valley, wheat-fields, meadows of the most vivid green; crops
luxuriant in most picturesque alternations; in a word, the whole a
vista of the richest agricultural scenery. And yet out of the
brightest and broadest fields of wheat, barley and oats, towered up
the colliery chimneys in every direction, like good-natured and
swarthy giants smoking their pipes complacently and "with
comfortable breasts" in view of the goodly scene. The golden grain
grew thick and tall up to the very pit's mouth. In the sun-light
above and gas-light below human industry was plying its differently-
bitted implements. There were men reaping and studding the pathway
of their sickles through the field with thickly-planted sheaves.
But right under them, a hundred fathoms deep, subterranean farmers
were at work, with black and sweaty brows, garnering the coal-
harvest sown there before the Flood. Sickle above and pick below
were gathering simultaneously the layers of wealth that Nature had
stored in her parlor and cellar for man.
I passed through Barnsley and Wakefield on this day's walk,--towns
full of profitable industries and busy populations, and growing in
both after the American impulse and expansion. If the good "Vicar
of Wakefield" of the olden time could revisit the scene of his
earthly experience, and look upon the old church of his ministry as
it now appears, renovated from bottom to the top of its grand and
lofty spire, he would not be entrapped again so easily into assent
to the Greek apothegm of the swindler.
I lodged at a little village inn between Wakefield and Leeds, after
a day of the most enjoyable walk that I had made. Never before,
between sun and sun, had I passed over such a section of above-
ground and under-ground industry and wealth. The next morning I
continued northward, and noticed still more striking combinations of
natural productions and human industries than on the preceding day.
One small, rural area in which these were blended impressed me
greatly, and I stopped to photograph the scene on my mind. In a
circle hardly a third of a mile in diameter, there was the heaviest
crop of oats growing that I had yet seen in England; in another part
of the same field there was a large brick-kiln; in another, an
extensive quarry and machinery for sawing the stone into all sizes
and shapes; then a furnace for casting iron, and lastly, a coal
mine; and all these departments of labor and production were in full
operation. It is quite possible that not one of the hundred
laborers on and under this ten-acre patch ever thought it an
extraordinary focus of production. Perhaps even the proprietors and
managers of the five different enterprises worked on the small space
had taken its rich and diversified fertilities as a matter of
course, as we take the rain, light and heat of summer; but to a
traveller "taking stock" of a country's resources, it could not but
be a point of view exciting admiration. I left it behind me deeply
impressed with the conviction that I had seen the most productive
ten-acre field that could be found on the surface of the globe,
counting in the variety and value of its surface and sub-surface
crops.
I took tea with a friend in Leeds, remaining only an hour or two in
that town, then pursuing my course northward. The wide world knows
so much of Leeds that any notice that I could give of it might seem
affected and presumptuous. It is to the Cloth-World what Rome is to
the Catholic. Its Cloth Hall is the St. Peter's of Coat-and-
trouserdom. Its rivers, streams and canals run black and blue with
the stringent juices of all the woods and weeds of the world used in
dyeing. The woods of all the continents come floating in here, like
baled summer clouds of heaven. It is a city of magnipotent
chimneys; and they stand thick and tall on the hills and in the
valleys around, and puff their black breathings into the face and
eyes of the sky above, baconising its countenance, and giving it no
time to wash up and look sober, calm and clean, except a few hours
on the sabbath. The Leeds Mercury is a power in the land, and
everybody who reads the English language in either hemisphere knows
Edward Baines by name.
As I emerged from the great, busy town on the north, I passed by the
estates and residences of its manufacturing aristocracy. The homes
they have built and embellished should satisfy the tastes and
ambitions of any hereditary nobility. They need only a little more
age to make them rival many baronial establishments. It is
interesting to see how the different classes of society are stepping
into each other's shoes in going up into higher grades of social
life. The merchant and manufacturing princes of England have not
only reached but surpassed the conditions of wealth, taste and
elegance which the hereditary peers of the realm occupied a century
ago; while the latter have gone up to the rich and luxurious
surroundings of kings and queens of that period. The upward
movement has reached the very lowest strata of society. Not only
have the small tradesmen and farmers ascended to the comfortable
conditions of large merchants and landowners of one hundred years
ago, but common day laborers are lifted upward by the general
uprising. I should not wonder if all the damp, low cellarless
cottages they now frequently inhabit should be swept away in less
than fifty years and replaced by as comfortable buildings as the
great middle class occupied in the childhood of the present
generation.
I found comfortable quarters for the night in the little village of
Bramhope, about five miles from Leeds. The next day I walked to
Harrogate, passing through Otley and across the celebrated Wharf
Vale. The scenery of this valley, as it opens upon you suddenly on
descending from the south into Otley, is exceedingly beautiful; not
so extensive as that of Belvoir Vale, but with all the features of
the latter landscape compressed in a smaller space; like a portrait
taken on a smaller scale. As you look off from the southern ridge
or wall of the valley, you seem to stand on the cord of a segment of
a circle, the radius of which touches the horizon at about five
miles to the north. This crescent is filled with the most delicate
lineaments of Nature's beauty. The opposite walls of the gallery
slope upward from the meandering Wharf so gently and yet reach the
blue ceiling of the sky so near, that all the paintings that panel
them are vividly distinct to your eye, and you can group all their
lights and shades in the compass of a single glance.
On the opposite side, half hidden and half revealed among the trees
of an ample park, stands Farnley Hall, a historical residence of an
old historical family. I had a letter of introduction to the
present proprietor, Mr. Fawkes, who, I hope, will not deem it a
disparagement to be called one of the Knights of the Shorthorns--a
more extensive, useful, and cosmopolitan order than were the Knights
of Rhodes or of Malta. Unfortunately for me, he was not at home;
but his steward, a very intelligent, gentlemanly and genial man,
took me over the establishment, and showed me all the stock that was
stabled, mostly bulls of different ages. They were all of the best
families of Shorthorn blood, and a better connoisseur of animal life
than myself could not have enjoyed the sight of such well-made
creatures more thoroughly than I did. The prince of the blood, in
my estimation, was "Lord Cobham," a cream-colored bull, with which
compared that famous animal in Greek mythology which played himself
off as such an Adonis among the bovines, must have been a shabby,
scraggy quadruped. Poor Europa! it would have been bad enough if
she had been run away with by a "Lord Cobham." But the like of him
did not live in her day.
After going through the housings for cattle, the steward took me to
the Hall, a grand old mansion full of English history, especially of
the Commonwealth period. Indeed, one large apartment was a museum
of relics of that stirring and stormy time. There, against the
antique, carved wainscoting, hung the great broad-brim of Oliver
Cromwell, with a circumference nearly as large as an opened
umbrella, heavy, coarse and grim. There hung a sword he wielded in
the fiery rifts of battle. There was Fairfax's sword hanging by its
side; and his famous war-drum lay beneath. Its leather lungs, that
once shouted the charge, were now still and frowsy, with no martial
speech left in them.
Mr. Fawkes owns about 15,000 acres of land, including most of the
valley of Otley, and extending back almost to Harrogate. He farms
about 450 acres, but grows no wheat. Indeed, I did not see a field
of it in a circle of five miles' diameter.
I reached Harrogate in the dusk of the evening, and found the town
alive with people mostly in the streets. It is a snug and cozy
little Saratoga among the hills of Yorkshire, away from the smoke,
soot and savor of the great manufacturing centres. It is a favorite
resort for a mild class of invalids, and of persons who need the
medicine of pure air and gentle exercise, blended with the quiet
tonics of cheery mirth and recreation. Superadded to all these
stimulants, there is a mineral spring at which the visitors, young
and old, drink most voluminously. I went down to it in the morning
before breakfast, and found it thronged by a multitude of men, women
and children, who drank off great goblets of it with astonishing
faith and facility. The rotunda was so filled with the fumes of
sulphur that I found it more easy to inhale than to imbibe, and
preferred to satisfy that sense as to the merits of the water.
The next day I reached the brave old city of Ripon. On the way I
stopped an hour or two at Ripley and visited the castle. The
building itself is a good specimen of the baronial hall of the olden
time. But the gardens and grounds constitute its distinguishing
feature. I never saw before such an exquisite arrangement of
flowers, even at Chatsworth or the Kew Gardens. All forms
imaginable were produced by them. The most extensive and elaborate
combination was a row of flower sofas reaching around the garden.
Each was from 20 to 30 feet in length. The seat was wrought in
geraniums of every tint, all grown to an even, compact surface,
presenting figures as diversified as the alternating hues could
produce. The back was worked in taller flowers, presenting the same
evenness of line and surface. On entering the garden gate and
catching the first sight of these beautiful structures, you take
them for veritable sofas, as perfectly wrought as anything was ever
done in Berlin wool.
Ripon is an interesting little city, with a fact-roll of history
reaching back into the dimmest centuries of the land. It has run
the gauntlet of all the Saxon, Danish, Scotch and Norman raids and
regimes. It was burnt once or twice by each of these races in the
struggle for supremacy. But with a plucky tenacity of life, it
arose successively out of its own ashes and spread its phoenix wings
to a new and vigorous vitality. A venerable cathedral looks down
upon it with a motherly face. Unique old buildings, with half their
centuries unrecorded and lost in oblivion, stand to this day in good
repair, as the homes of happy children, who play at marbles and the
last sports of the day just as if they were born in houses only a
year older than themselves. Institutions and customs older than the
cathedral are kept up with a filial faith in their virtue. One of
the most interesting of these, I believe, was established by the
Saxon Edgar or Alfred--it matters not which; they were only a
century or two apart, and that space is but a trifling circumstance
in the history of this old country. One of these kings appointed an
officer called a "wakeman" for the town. He must originally have
been a kind of secular beadle of the community, or a curfew
constable, to see the whole population well a-bed in good season.
One of his duties consisted in blowing a horn every night at nine
o'clock as a signal to turn in. But a remarkable consideration was
attached to faithful compliance with this summons. If any house or
shop was robbed before sunrise, a tax was levied upon every
inhabitant, of 4d. if his house had one outer door, and of 8d. if it
had two. This tax was to compensate the sufferer for his loss, and
also to put the whole community under bonds to keep the peace and to
feel responsible for the safety of each other's property. Thus it
not only acted as a great mutual insurance company of which every
householder was a member, but it made him, as it were, a special
constable against burglary. This old Saxon institution is in full
life and vigor to-day. The wakeman is still the highest secular
official of the town. For a thousand consecutive years the
wakeman's toot-horn has been blown at night over the successive
generations of the little cathedral city. This is an interesting
fact, full of promise. No American could fail to admire this
conservatism who appreciates national individuality. No one, at
heart, could more highly esteem these salient traits of a people's
character. And here I may as well put in a few thoughts on this
subject as at any stage of my walk.
Good-natured reader, are you a man of sensitive perceptions as to
the proprieties and dignities of dress and deportment which should
characterise some great historical personage whose name you have
held in profound veneration all your life long? Now, in the wayward
drift of your imagination among the freaks of modern fashion, did it
ever dare to present before your eyes St. Paul in strapped
pantaloons, figured velvet vest, swallow-tailed coat, stove-pipe
hat, and a cockney glass at his eye? Did your fancy, in its wildest
fictions, ever pass such an image across the speculum of your mental
vision?
Gentle reader, "in maiden meditation, fancy free," did a dreamy
thought of yours ever stray through the histories of your sex and
its modes of dress and adornment, and so blend or transpose them as
to present to you, in a sudden flash of the imagination, the Virgin
Mary dressed like the Empress Eugenie? Readers both, did not that
fancy trouble you, as if an unholy thought had fallen into the soul?
Well, a thought like that must trouble the American when his fancy
passes before his mind's eye the image of Old England Americanised.
And a faculty more serious and trusty than fancy will present this
transformation to him, day by day, as he visits the great centres of
the nation's life and industry. In London, Manchester, Liverpool,
and all the most busy and prosperous commercial and manufacturing
towns, he will see that England is becoming Americanised shockingly
fast. In all these populous places it is losing the old
individuality that once distinguished the grandfatherland of fifty
millions who now speak its language beyond the sea. Look at London!
look at the miles of three and four story houses under the mason's
hands, now running out in every direction from the city. Will you
see a single feature of the Old England of our common memories in
them? No, not one! no more than in a modern English dress-coat, or
in one of the iron rails of the British Great Western, or of the
Illinois Central. It is doubtful if there will be anything of
England left in London at the end of the next fifty years, unless it
be the fog and the Lord Mayor's Show. Already the radicals are
crying out against both of these institutions, which are merely
local, by the way. The tailor's shears, the mason's trowel, and the
carpenter's edge-tools are evening everything in Christendom to one
dead level of uniformity. The railroads and telegraphs are all
working to the same end. All these agencies of modern civilization
at first lay their innovating hands upon large cities or commercial
centres. Thence they work outward slowly and transform the
appearance and habits of the country. The transformations I have
noticed in England since 1846 are wonderful, utilitarian, and
productive of absolute and rigid comfort to the people; still, I
must confess, they inspire in me a sentiment akin to that which our
village fathers experienced when the old church in which they
worshipped from childhood was pulled down to make room for a better
one.
To every American, sympathising with these sentiments, it must be
interesting to visit such a rural little city as Ripon, and find
populations that cling with reverence and affection to the old Saxon
institutions of Alfred. It will make him feel that he stands in the
unbroken lineage of the centuries, to hear the wakeman's horn, and
to know that it has been blown, spring, summer, autumn and winter,
in all weathers, in weal and in woe, for a thousand years. As Old
England is driven farther and farther back from London, Manchester,
Liverpool, and other great improving towns, she will find refuge and
residence in these retired country villages. Here she will wear
longest and last the features in which she was engraven on the minds
of all the millions who call her mother beyond the sea.
The next day I visited the celebrated Fountain Abbey in Studley
Park,--a grand relic of antiquity, framed with silver and emerald
work of lakelets, lawns, shrubberies and trees as beautifully
arranged as art, taste and wealth could set them. The old abbey is
a majestic ruin which fills one with wonder as he looks up at its
broken arches and towers and sees the dimensions marked by the
pedestals or foot-prints of its templed columns. It stands rather
in a narrow glen than in a valley, and was commenced, it is
supposed, about 1130. The yew-trees under which the monks
bivouacked while at work upon the magnificent edifice, are still
standing, bearing leaves as large and green as those that covered
the enthusiastic architects of that early time. In the height of
its prosperity and power, the lands of the abbey embraced over
72,000 acres. The Park enclosing this great monument of an earlier
age contains 250 acres, and is really an earthly elysium of beauty.
It was comforting to learn that it was laid out so late as 1720, and
that all the noble trees that filled it had grown to their present
grandeur within the intervening period. Here I saw for the first
time in England our hard-maple. It was a spindling thing, looking
as if it had suffered much from fever and ague or rheumatism; but it
was pleasant to see it admitted into a larger fellowship of trees
than our New England soil ever bore. On a green, lawn-faced slope,
at the turning of the principal walk, there was a little tree a few
feet high enclosed in by a circular wire fence. It was planted by
the Princess of Wales on a visit of the royal pair to Studley soon
after their marriage. The fair Dane left her card in this way to
the old Abbey, which began to rise upon its foundations soon after
the stalwart Danish sovereign of England fell at the Battle of
Hastings. Will any one of her posterity ever bear his name and sit
upon the throne he vacated for that bloody grave? No! She will
remember a better name at the font. The day and the name of the
Harolds, Williams, Henrys, Charles's, and Georges are over and gone
forever. ALBERT THE GOOD has estopped that succession; and England,
doubtless, for centuries to come, will wear that name and its
memories in her crown.
After spending a few hours at Studley Park, I returned to Ripon and
went on to Thirsk, where I spent the Sabbath with a Friend. The
next day he drove me over to Rievaulx Abbey, which was the mother of
Fountain Abbey. On the way to it we passed the ruins of another of
these grand structures of that religious age, called Byland Abbey,
where Robert Bruce came within an ace of capturing King Edward on
his retreat from Scotland, after the Battle of Bannockburn.
One of the objects of this excursion was to visit the establishment
of Lord Faversham, near Helmsley, who is one of the most scientific
and successful stock-raisers, of the Shorthorn blood, in England,
and to whom I had a note of introduction. But he, too, was not at
home, which I much regretted, as I was desirous of seeing one of the
peers of the realm who enter into this culture of animal life with
so much personal interest and assiduity. His manager, however, was
very affable and attentive, ready and pleased to give any
information desired upon different points. He showed us a splendid
set of animals. Indeed, I had never seen a herd to equal it. There
were several bulls of different ages with a perfection of form truly
admirable. Some of them had already drawn first prizes at different
shows. Several noble specimens of this celebrated herd have been
sold to stock-raisers in America, Australia and in continental
countries. The most perfect of all the well-made animals on the
establishment, according to my untrained perceptions of symmetry,
was a milk-white cow, called "The Lady in White," three years old.
She and Mr. Fawkes' "Lord Cobham" should be shown together. I doubt
if a better mated pair could be found in England. There was a large
number of cows feeding in the park which would command admiration at
any exhibition of stock. Lord Faversham's famous "Skyrocket" ended
his days with much eclat. When getting into years, and into
monstrous obesity, he was presented as a contribution to the
Lancashire Relief Fund. Before passing into the butcher's hands, he
was exhibited in Leeds, and realised about 200 pounds as a show.
Thus as a curiosity first, and as a small mountain of fat beef
afterward, he proved a generous gift to the suffering operatives in
the manufacturing districts.
Passing through the park gate, we entered upon a lawn esplanade
looking down upon the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. This broad terrace
extended for apparently a half of a mile, and was as finely carpeted
piece of ground as you will find in England. No hair of horse or
dog groomed and brushed with the nicest care, and soft and shining
with the healthiest vitality, could surpass in delicacy and life of
surface the grass coverlet of this long terrace, from which you
looked down upon that grand monument of twelfth-century architecture
half veiled among the trees of the glen. This was one of the oldest
abbeys in the north of England, and the mother of several of them.
Some of its walls are still as entire and perfect as those of
Tintern, on the Wye. It was founded by the monks of the St. Bernard
order, in 1131, according to the historical record. Really those
black-cowled masons and carvers must have given the enthusiasm and
genius of the early painters of the Virgin to these magnificent
structures. I will not go into the subject at large here, leaving
it to form an entire chapter, when I have seen most of the old
abbeys of the country. In looking up at their walls, arches and
columns, one marvels to see the most delicate and elaborate vine and
flower-work of the carver's chisel apparently as perfect as when it
engraved the last line; and this, too, in face of the frosts and
beating storms of six hundred years. The largest ivy I ever saw
buttressed one of the windowed walls with ten thousand cross-folded
fingers and foliage of vivid green piled thick and high upon the
teeth-marks of time. The trunk was a full foot through at the butt.
A few years ago a large mound was uncovered near the ruin, and found
to be composed of cinders, showing incontestably that the monks had
worked iron ore very extensively, thus teaching the common people
that art as well as agriculture. These cinders have been used very
largely in repairing the roads for a considerable distance around.
On returning to Thirsk over the Hambleton range of hills, we crossed
thousands of acres of moor-land covered with heather in full bloom,
looking like a purple sea. It was a splendid sight. My friend, who
was an artist, stopped for a while to sketch one or two views of the
scene. As we proceeded, we saw several green and golden fields
impinging upon this florid waste, serving to illustrate what might
be done with the vast tracts of land in England and Scotland now
bristling with this thick and prickly vegetation. The heatherland
over which we were passing was utilised in a rather singular manner.
It yielded pasturage to two sets of industrials--sheep and bees. As
the heather blossom is thought to impart a peculiarly pleasant
flavor to honey, I was told many bee-stock-raisers of Lincolnshire
brought their hives to this section to pasture them for a season on
this purple prairie.
The westward view from the precipitous heights of the Hambleton
ridge is one of the most beautiful and extensive you will find in
England, well worth a special journey to see it. The declining sun
was flooding the great basin with the day's last, best smile,
filling it to the golden rim of the horizon with a soft light in
which lay a landscape of thirty miles' depth, embracing full fifty
villages and hamlets, parks, plantations and groves, all looking
"like emeralds chased in gold." On the whole, I am inclined to
think many tourists would regard this view as even superior to that
of Belvoir Vale. It might be justly placed between that and Wharf
Vale.
A London gentleman produced a most unique picture on the forehead of
one of these hills, which may be seen at a great distance. In the
first place, he had a smooth, lawn-like surface prepared on the
steep slope. Then he cut out the form of a horse in the green turf,
sowing the whole contour of the animal with lime. This brought out
in such bold relief the body and limbs, that, at several miles
distance, you seem to see a colossal white horse standing on his
four legs, perfect in form and feature, even to ear and nostril.
The symmetry is perfect, although the body, head, legs and tail
cover a space of _four_ acres!
The next day I took staff for Northallerton, reaching that town
about the middle of the afternoon. Passed through a highly
cultivated district, and saw, for the first time, several reaping
machines at work in the fields. I was struck at the manner in which
they were used. I have noticed a peculiarity in reaping in this
section which must appear singular to an American. The men cut
inward instead of outward, as with us. And these machines were
following the same rule! As they went around the field, they were
followed or rather met by men and women, each with an allotted beat,
who rushed in behind and gathered up the fallen from the standing
grain so as to make a clear path for the next round. There seemed
to be no reason for this singular and awkward practice, except the
adhesion to an old custom of reaping. The grain was not very stout,
nor was it lodged.
From Northallerton I hastened on to Newcastle-upon-Tyne in order to
attend, for the first time in my life, the meetings of the British
Association. I reached that town on the 25th of August, and
remained there a week, enjoying one of the greatest treats that ever
fell to my lot. I will reserve a brief description of it for a
separate chapter at the end of this volume, if my Notes on other
matters do not crowd it out.