Perhaps it would be better to come to York somewhat earlier in the year
than the 2d of September. By that time the English summer has suffered
often if not severe discouragements. It has really only two months out
of the year to itself, and even July and August are not always constant
to it. To be sure, their defection cannot spoil it, but they dispose it
to the slights of September in a dejection from which there is no rise
to those coquetries with October known to our own summer. Yet, having
said so much, I feel bound to add that our nine days in York, from the
2d to the 12th of September, were more summer than autumn days, some
wholly, some partly, with hours of sunshine keeping the flowers bright
which the rain kept fresh. If you walked fast in this sunshine you were
quite hot, and sometimes in the rain you were uncomfortably warm, or at
least you were wet. If the mornings demanded a fire in the grate, the
evenings were so clement that the lamp was sufficient, and the noons
were very well with neither.
I
The day of our arrival in York began bright at Sheffield, where there
was a man quarrelling so loudly and aimlessly in the station that we
were glad to get away from him, as well as from the mountains of slag
surrounding the iron metropolis. The train ran through a pass in these,
and then we found ourselves in a plain country, and, though the day
turned gray and misty, there seemed a sort of stored sunshine in the
fields of wheat which the farmers were harvesting far and near. One has
heard so much of the decay of the English agriculture that one sees
what is apparently the contrary with nothing less than astonishment. The
acreage of these wheat-fields was large, and the yield heavier than I
could remember to have seen at home. Where the crop had been got in,
much ploughing for the next year had been done already, and where the
ploughing was finished the work of sowing by drill was going steadily
forward, in the faith that such an unprecedented summer as was now
passing would return another year. At all these pleasant labors, of
course, the rooks were helping, or at least bossing.