Chapter Nine.

Chapter Nine.A Quiet Sunday at Lount—A Visit to a Pottery—Beeston Hall—A Broiling Day.“How still the morning of this hallowed day!Hushed is the voice of rural labour,The ploughboy’s whistle and the milkmaid’s song.”June 28th.The country is indeed a Highlands in miniature. I might describe the scenery in this way: Take a sheet of paper and thereon draw irregular lines, across and across, up and down, in any conceivable direction. These lines, then, shall represent blackthorn hedges bounding fields of flowering grass and hay. Place trees in your picture anywhere, and, here and there, a wood of dwarfed oak, and dot the field-nooks with picturesque-looking cattle-huts. In the centre let there be a cluster of irregularly-built brick-tiled houses and the domes of a pottery works. This, then, is Lount and its surroundings, where we are now bivouacked. But to complete the sketch there must be footpaths meandering through the meadows, with gaps in the hedges for rustic stiles. Nor must the cattle be forgotten.And all the country visible from this point is broken up into round hills, and each field is a collection of smaller hills, shaped like waves of a storm-tossed ocean.How still and quiet it is! And above the green of fields and woods is a blue, blue sunny sky. Larks are singing up yonder, their songs mingling sweetly with the chiming of the church bells that comes floating over the hills, rising and falling as the breeze does, now high and clear, now soft and far-away like.I had the caravan half-filled this morning with bright-eyed, wondering children. A parent brought me a red cotton handkerchief.“T’missus,” he explained, “was makin’ oop a pie, and I thought upon thee loike.”It was kindly, and I couldn’t refuse the gift, though gooseberry pies form no part of the Wanderer’smenu.Ten o’clock pm.—The full moon has just risen over the dark oak woods; a strangely white dense fog has filled all the hollows—a fog you can almost stretch out your hands and touch. The knolls in the fields all appear over it, looking like little islands in the midst of an inland sea.The corncrake is sounding his rattle in the hayfields—a veritable voice of the night is he—and not another sound is to be heard.Passed a garden a few minutes ago while walking out. Such a sight! Glowworms in thousands; far more lovely than fireflies in an Indian jungle.To bed.June 29th.—We got under way by 8:30, after a brief visit to the Coleorton Pottery. This place has an ugly enough appearance outside, but is very interesting internally. The proprietor kindly showed my coachman and me over the works. We saw the great heaps of blue clay that had been dug from the hillside and left exposed for weeks to the weather, the tanks in which it is mixed with water, the machinery for washing and sifting it, the clay being finally boiled to the consistency of putty. An old man took dabs of this putty and cast them on a revolving table, smiling as he did so as he watched our wondering looks, for lo! cups and saucers and teapots seemed to grow up under his fingers, and a whole tea-set was produced more quickly than one could have brewed a cup of tea.A somewhat misty morning, but roads good though hilly, and scenery romantic. But at Castle Donington, a long brick town, the scene changes. Away go hill and dale, away goes all romance, and we pass through a flat country, with nothing in it to enlist sympathy save the trees and rose-clad hedges.But soon again comes another change, and we cross the broad and silvery Trent, stopping, however, on the bridge to admire the view.We arrive at Long Eaton, and encamp by the roadside to cook dinner. Rows of ugly brick houses, a lazy canal with banks black with coal dust; the people here look as inactive as does their canal. Took the wrong turning and went miles out of our way.We were stormed on our exit from Long Eaton by hordes of Board School children. They clustered round us like locusts, they swarmed like bees, and hung to the caravan in scores. No good my threatening them with the whip. I suppose they knew I did not mean much mischief, and one score was only frightened off to make room for another.At Beeston, near Nottingham, I got talking to a tricyclist; a visit to a caravan followed, and then an introduction to a wealthy lace merchant. The latter would not hear of my going two miles farther to an inn. I must come into his grounds. So here in a cosy corner of the lawn of Beeston Hall lies the Wanderer, overshadowed by giant elms and glorious purple beeches, and the lace manufacturer and his wife are simply hospitality personified.Such is the glorious uncertainty of a gentleman gipsy’s life—one night bivouacked by a lonely roadside in a black country, another in a paradise like this.July 2nd.—A broiling hot day—almost too hot to write or think. At present we are encamped on the road, two miles from Worksop to the south. Tired though the horses were, we pushed on and on for miles, seeking shade but finding none; and now we have given up, and stand in the glaring sunshine. Roads are of whitest limestone, and, though there is little wind, every wheel of every vehicle raises a dust and a powder that seem to penetrate our very pores. We are all languid, drowsy, lethargic. Polly the parrot alone appears to enjoy the heat and the glare. The haymakers in yonder field are lazy-looking, silent, and solemn—a melting solemnity; the martins on that single telegraph-wire rest and pant open-mouthed, while the cattle in the meadow, with tails erect, go flying from end to end and back again in a vain attempt to escape from the heat and the flies.But the flowers that grow by the wayside and trail over the hedges revel in the sunshine—the purple vetches, the red clover, the yellow wild-pea, and the starry Margueritas. Roses in sheets are spread over the hawthorn fences, and crimson poppies dot the cornfields. The white clover is alive with bees. This seems a bee country; everybody at present is either drumming bees or whitewashing cottages.Got up to-day and had breakfast shortly after six. The kindly landlord of the Greyhound, Mr Scothern, and genial Mr Tebbet, one of his Grace the Duke of Portland’s head clerks, had promised to drive me through the forest grounds of Welbeck.As the day is, so was the morning, though the sun’s warmth was then pleasant enough.Our drive would occupy some two hours and a half, and in that time we would see many a “ferlie,” as the Scotch say. The bare impossibility of giving the reader anything like a correct account of this most enjoyable ride impresses me while I write, and I feel inclined to throw down my pen. I shall not do so, however, but must leave much unsaid. If any one wishes to see the country around here as I have seen it this morning, and wander in the forest and enjoy Nature in her home of homes, he must come to Welbeck in summer. Never mind distance; come, you will have something to dream pleasantly about for many a day.A visit to the great irrigation canal, by which all the drainage from Mansfield is carried along, and utilised by being allowed to flood meadows, might not appear a very romantic way of beginning a summer morning’s outing. But it was interesting nevertheless. The meadows which are periodically flooded are wondrously green; three crops of hay are taken from each every season. They are on the slope, the canal running along above. The pure water that drains from these meadows finds its way into a river or trout stream that meanders along beneath them, and is overhung by rocks and woodland. Fish in abundance are caught here, and at present are being used to stock ponds and lochs on the duke’s estate.We soon crossed this stream by a Gothic bridge, and plunged into what I may call a new forest. There are fine trees here in abundance, but it is a storm-tossed woodland, and much of the felled timber is so twisted in grain as to be useless for ordinary purposes.We saw many trees that had been struck by lightning, their branches hurled in all directions. Up a steep hill after leaving this forest, and stopping at an old-fashioned inn, we regaled ourselves on ginger-ale. The landlord pointed with some pride to the sign that hung over the door.“The duke himself—the old duke, sir, his Grace of the leathern breeches—brought that sign here himself—in his own hands and in his own carriage, and it isn’t many real gentlemen that would have done that, sir!”The memory of the old duke is as much reverenced here, it appears to me, as that of Peter the Great is in Russia. The stories and anecdotes of his life you hear in the neighbourhood would fill a volume. People all admit he was eccentric, but his eccentricity filled many a hungry mouth, soothed the sorrows of the aged, and made many and many a home happy.The tunnel towards Warsop is about two miles long, lighted by gas at night, and from windows above by day; there are a riding-school and wonderful stables underground, ballroom, etc, etc. I am writing these lines within a quarter of a mile of the open-air stables. The place looks like a small city.Just one—only one—anecdote of the old duke’s eccentricity. It was told me last night, and proves his Grace to have been a man of kindly feeling. A certain architect had finished—on some part of the ground—a large archway and pillared colonnade, at great expense to the duke, no doubt. It did not please the latter, however, but he would not wound the architect’s feelings by telling him so. No, but one evening he got together some two hundred men, and every stone was taken away and the ground levelled before morning. The architect must have stared at the transformation when he came next day, but the matter was never even referred to by the duke, and of course the architect said nothing.The country through which we went after passing the duke’s irrigation works was a rolling one, hill and dale, green fields, forest, loch, and stream. There are wild creatures in it in abundance. Yonder are two swans sailing peacefully along on a little lake; here, near the edge of the stream, a water-hen with a brood of little black young ones. She hurries them along through the hedge as our trap approaches, but the more hurry the less speed, and more than one poor little mite tumbles on its back, and has to be helped up by the mother. Yonder on the grass is a brace of parent partridges; they do not fly away; their heads are together; they are having a loving consultation on ways and means, and the young brood is only a little way off. Before us now, and adown the road, runs a great cock pheasant; he finally takes flight and floats away towards the woods. Look in the stream, how the glad fish leap, and the bubbles escaping from the mud in that deep dark pool tell where some fat eel is feeding. We pause for a moment to admire the trees, and the music of birds and melancholy croodling of the cushat fall upon our ears, while young rabbits scurry about in all directions, and a cuckoo with attendant linnet flies close over our horse’s head.Not far from the little inn where we stopped we saw the ruins of King John’s palace. But little is left of it now, the stones having been put to other purposes, and it looks as like the ruins of an old barn as those of a palace.We leave the road and pass into the forest proper—the old Sherwood Forest, sacred to the memory of Robin Hood and Little John and the merry monks of the olden time.We enter Birkland. Saving those wondrous and ancient oaks that stand here and there, and look so weird and uncanny as almost to strike the beholder with awe, the forest is all new. Long straight broad avenues go in all directions through it. The ground on these is as level as a lawn, and just as soft and green. Here is the Shamble Oak. Its weirdlike arms are still green, though it is said to be 1,700 years old, and may be more. The trunk, round which twelve good strides will hardly take you, is sadly gutted by fire. Some boys set it alight in trying to smoke out a hornet’s hive. Here, in this oak, it is said, Robin Hood hung his slaughtered deer, and, in more modern times, keepers and poachers used it as a larder.A quaint and pretty log-hutà la Russehas recently been erected near the Shamble Oak. It is not yet furnished, but we found our way inside, the keeper in attendance here giving us great and impressive injunctions to wipe our feet and not step off the canvas. I wonder he did not bid us remove our shoes.From the balcony of this log-hut one could have rabbit-shooting all day long, and pigeon-shooting in the evening. I hope no one ever will though.We went home a different way, Mr Tebbet opening the double-padlocked gates for us. We passed the Parliament Tree, as it is called, where they tell us King John used to assemble his councillors. It is an oak still, a skeleton oak hung together by chains.From the brow of a hill which we soon reached, we enjoyed a panorama, the like of which is not elsewhere to be seen in all broad England. From Howitt’s “Rural Life in England” I cull the following:“Near Mansfield there remains a considerable wood, Harlowe Wood, and a fine scattering of old oaks near Berry Hill, in the same neighbourhood, but the greater part is now an open waste, stretching in a succession of low hills and long winding valleys, dark with heather. A few solitary and battered oaks standing here and there, the last melancholy remnants of these vast and ancient woods, the beautiful springs, swift and crystalline brooks, and broad sheets of water lying abroad amid the dark heath, and haunted by numbers of wild ducks and the heron, still remain. But at the Clipstone extremity of the forest, a remnant of its ancient woodlands remains, unrifled, except of its deer—a specimen of what the whole once was, and a specimen of consummate beauty and interest. Birkland and Bilhaghe taken together form a tract of land extending from Ollerton along the side of Thoresby Park, the seat of Earl Manvers, to Clipstone Park, of about five miles in length, and one or two in width. Bilhaghe is a forest of oaks, and is clothed with the most impressive aspect of age that can perhaps be presented to the eye in these kingdoms... A thousand years, ten thousand tempests, lightnings, winds, and wintry violence have all flung their utmost force on these trees, and there they stand, trunk after trunk, scathed, hollow, grey, and gnarled, stretching out their bare sturdy arms on their mingled foliage and ruin—a life in death. All is grey and old. The ground is grey beneath—the trees are grey with clinging lichens—the very heather and fern that spring beneath them have a character of the past.“But Bilhaghe is only half of the forest-remains here; in a continuous line with it lies Birkland—a tract which bears its character in its name—the land of birches. It is a forest perfectly unique. It is equally ancient with Bilhaghe, but it has a less dilapidated air. It is a region of grace and poetry. I have seen many a wood, and many a wood of birches, and some of them amazingly beautiful, too, in one quarter or another of this fair island, but in England nothing that can compare with this... On all sides, standing in their solemn steadfastness, you see huge, gnarled, strangely-coloured and mossed oaks, some riven and laid bare from summit to root with the thunderbolts of past tempests. An immense tree is called the Shamble Oak, being said to be the one in which Robin Hood hung his slaughtered deer, but which was more probably used by the keepers for that purpose. By whomsoever it was so used, however, there still remain the hooks within its vast hollow.”But it is time to be up and off. We lay last night in Mr Tebbet’s private meadow. Had a long walk before I could secure a suitable place. But the place was eminently quiet and exceedingly private, near lawns and gardens and giant elms. The elm that grows near the pretty cemetery, in which haymakers were so busy this morning, is, with the exception of the oak at Newstead Abbey gates, the finest ever I have seen; and yet an old man died but recently in Mansfield workhouse who remembered the time he could bend it to the ground.Warsop, which we reached over rough and stony roads and steepish hills, is a greystone village, the houses slated or tiled blue or red, a fine church on the hilltop among lordly trees, a graveyard on the brae beneath with a white pathway meandering up through it to the porch.At the sixth milestone we reached a hilltop, from which we could see into several counties. Such a view as this is worth wandering leagues to look at. We watered the horses here, at the last of the Duke of Portland’s lodges.Thou down hill again. How lovely the little village of Cuckney looks down there, its crimson houses shimmering through the trees! We bought eggs at the inn called the Greendale Oak. There is a story attached to this oak which my reader has doubtless heard or read.This is the land of oaks, and a smiling land too, a land of wealth and beauty, a great garden-land.

“How still the morning of this hallowed day!Hushed is the voice of rural labour,The ploughboy’s whistle and the milkmaid’s song.”

“How still the morning of this hallowed day!Hushed is the voice of rural labour,The ploughboy’s whistle and the milkmaid’s song.”

June 28th.

The country is indeed a Highlands in miniature. I might describe the scenery in this way: Take a sheet of paper and thereon draw irregular lines, across and across, up and down, in any conceivable direction. These lines, then, shall represent blackthorn hedges bounding fields of flowering grass and hay. Place trees in your picture anywhere, and, here and there, a wood of dwarfed oak, and dot the field-nooks with picturesque-looking cattle-huts. In the centre let there be a cluster of irregularly-built brick-tiled houses and the domes of a pottery works. This, then, is Lount and its surroundings, where we are now bivouacked. But to complete the sketch there must be footpaths meandering through the meadows, with gaps in the hedges for rustic stiles. Nor must the cattle be forgotten.

And all the country visible from this point is broken up into round hills, and each field is a collection of smaller hills, shaped like waves of a storm-tossed ocean.

How still and quiet it is! And above the green of fields and woods is a blue, blue sunny sky. Larks are singing up yonder, their songs mingling sweetly with the chiming of the church bells that comes floating over the hills, rising and falling as the breeze does, now high and clear, now soft and far-away like.

I had the caravan half-filled this morning with bright-eyed, wondering children. A parent brought me a red cotton handkerchief.

“T’missus,” he explained, “was makin’ oop a pie, and I thought upon thee loike.”

It was kindly, and I couldn’t refuse the gift, though gooseberry pies form no part of the Wanderer’smenu.

Ten o’clock pm.—The full moon has just risen over the dark oak woods; a strangely white dense fog has filled all the hollows—a fog you can almost stretch out your hands and touch. The knolls in the fields all appear over it, looking like little islands in the midst of an inland sea.

The corncrake is sounding his rattle in the hayfields—a veritable voice of the night is he—and not another sound is to be heard.

Passed a garden a few minutes ago while walking out. Such a sight! Glowworms in thousands; far more lovely than fireflies in an Indian jungle.

To bed.

June 29th.—We got under way by 8:30, after a brief visit to the Coleorton Pottery. This place has an ugly enough appearance outside, but is very interesting internally. The proprietor kindly showed my coachman and me over the works. We saw the great heaps of blue clay that had been dug from the hillside and left exposed for weeks to the weather, the tanks in which it is mixed with water, the machinery for washing and sifting it, the clay being finally boiled to the consistency of putty. An old man took dabs of this putty and cast them on a revolving table, smiling as he did so as he watched our wondering looks, for lo! cups and saucers and teapots seemed to grow up under his fingers, and a whole tea-set was produced more quickly than one could have brewed a cup of tea.

A somewhat misty morning, but roads good though hilly, and scenery romantic. But at Castle Donington, a long brick town, the scene changes. Away go hill and dale, away goes all romance, and we pass through a flat country, with nothing in it to enlist sympathy save the trees and rose-clad hedges.

But soon again comes another change, and we cross the broad and silvery Trent, stopping, however, on the bridge to admire the view.

We arrive at Long Eaton, and encamp by the roadside to cook dinner. Rows of ugly brick houses, a lazy canal with banks black with coal dust; the people here look as inactive as does their canal. Took the wrong turning and went miles out of our way.

We were stormed on our exit from Long Eaton by hordes of Board School children. They clustered round us like locusts, they swarmed like bees, and hung to the caravan in scores. No good my threatening them with the whip. I suppose they knew I did not mean much mischief, and one score was only frightened off to make room for another.

At Beeston, near Nottingham, I got talking to a tricyclist; a visit to a caravan followed, and then an introduction to a wealthy lace merchant. The latter would not hear of my going two miles farther to an inn. I must come into his grounds. So here in a cosy corner of the lawn of Beeston Hall lies the Wanderer, overshadowed by giant elms and glorious purple beeches, and the lace manufacturer and his wife are simply hospitality personified.

Such is the glorious uncertainty of a gentleman gipsy’s life—one night bivouacked by a lonely roadside in a black country, another in a paradise like this.

July 2nd.—A broiling hot day—almost too hot to write or think. At present we are encamped on the road, two miles from Worksop to the south. Tired though the horses were, we pushed on and on for miles, seeking shade but finding none; and now we have given up, and stand in the glaring sunshine. Roads are of whitest limestone, and, though there is little wind, every wheel of every vehicle raises a dust and a powder that seem to penetrate our very pores. We are all languid, drowsy, lethargic. Polly the parrot alone appears to enjoy the heat and the glare. The haymakers in yonder field are lazy-looking, silent, and solemn—a melting solemnity; the martins on that single telegraph-wire rest and pant open-mouthed, while the cattle in the meadow, with tails erect, go flying from end to end and back again in a vain attempt to escape from the heat and the flies.

But the flowers that grow by the wayside and trail over the hedges revel in the sunshine—the purple vetches, the red clover, the yellow wild-pea, and the starry Margueritas. Roses in sheets are spread over the hawthorn fences, and crimson poppies dot the cornfields. The white clover is alive with bees. This seems a bee country; everybody at present is either drumming bees or whitewashing cottages.

Got up to-day and had breakfast shortly after six. The kindly landlord of the Greyhound, Mr Scothern, and genial Mr Tebbet, one of his Grace the Duke of Portland’s head clerks, had promised to drive me through the forest grounds of Welbeck.

As the day is, so was the morning, though the sun’s warmth was then pleasant enough.

Our drive would occupy some two hours and a half, and in that time we would see many a “ferlie,” as the Scotch say. The bare impossibility of giving the reader anything like a correct account of this most enjoyable ride impresses me while I write, and I feel inclined to throw down my pen. I shall not do so, however, but must leave much unsaid. If any one wishes to see the country around here as I have seen it this morning, and wander in the forest and enjoy Nature in her home of homes, he must come to Welbeck in summer. Never mind distance; come, you will have something to dream pleasantly about for many a day.

A visit to the great irrigation canal, by which all the drainage from Mansfield is carried along, and utilised by being allowed to flood meadows, might not appear a very romantic way of beginning a summer morning’s outing. But it was interesting nevertheless. The meadows which are periodically flooded are wondrously green; three crops of hay are taken from each every season. They are on the slope, the canal running along above. The pure water that drains from these meadows finds its way into a river or trout stream that meanders along beneath them, and is overhung by rocks and woodland. Fish in abundance are caught here, and at present are being used to stock ponds and lochs on the duke’s estate.

We soon crossed this stream by a Gothic bridge, and plunged into what I may call a new forest. There are fine trees here in abundance, but it is a storm-tossed woodland, and much of the felled timber is so twisted in grain as to be useless for ordinary purposes.

We saw many trees that had been struck by lightning, their branches hurled in all directions. Up a steep hill after leaving this forest, and stopping at an old-fashioned inn, we regaled ourselves on ginger-ale. The landlord pointed with some pride to the sign that hung over the door.

“The duke himself—the old duke, sir, his Grace of the leathern breeches—brought that sign here himself—in his own hands and in his own carriage, and it isn’t many real gentlemen that would have done that, sir!”

The memory of the old duke is as much reverenced here, it appears to me, as that of Peter the Great is in Russia. The stories and anecdotes of his life you hear in the neighbourhood would fill a volume. People all admit he was eccentric, but his eccentricity filled many a hungry mouth, soothed the sorrows of the aged, and made many and many a home happy.

The tunnel towards Warsop is about two miles long, lighted by gas at night, and from windows above by day; there are a riding-school and wonderful stables underground, ballroom, etc, etc. I am writing these lines within a quarter of a mile of the open-air stables. The place looks like a small city.

Just one—only one—anecdote of the old duke’s eccentricity. It was told me last night, and proves his Grace to have been a man of kindly feeling. A certain architect had finished—on some part of the ground—a large archway and pillared colonnade, at great expense to the duke, no doubt. It did not please the latter, however, but he would not wound the architect’s feelings by telling him so. No, but one evening he got together some two hundred men, and every stone was taken away and the ground levelled before morning. The architect must have stared at the transformation when he came next day, but the matter was never even referred to by the duke, and of course the architect said nothing.

The country through which we went after passing the duke’s irrigation works was a rolling one, hill and dale, green fields, forest, loch, and stream. There are wild creatures in it in abundance. Yonder are two swans sailing peacefully along on a little lake; here, near the edge of the stream, a water-hen with a brood of little black young ones. She hurries them along through the hedge as our trap approaches, but the more hurry the less speed, and more than one poor little mite tumbles on its back, and has to be helped up by the mother. Yonder on the grass is a brace of parent partridges; they do not fly away; their heads are together; they are having a loving consultation on ways and means, and the young brood is only a little way off. Before us now, and adown the road, runs a great cock pheasant; he finally takes flight and floats away towards the woods. Look in the stream, how the glad fish leap, and the bubbles escaping from the mud in that deep dark pool tell where some fat eel is feeding. We pause for a moment to admire the trees, and the music of birds and melancholy croodling of the cushat fall upon our ears, while young rabbits scurry about in all directions, and a cuckoo with attendant linnet flies close over our horse’s head.

Not far from the little inn where we stopped we saw the ruins of King John’s palace. But little is left of it now, the stones having been put to other purposes, and it looks as like the ruins of an old barn as those of a palace.

We leave the road and pass into the forest proper—the old Sherwood Forest, sacred to the memory of Robin Hood and Little John and the merry monks of the olden time.

We enter Birkland. Saving those wondrous and ancient oaks that stand here and there, and look so weird and uncanny as almost to strike the beholder with awe, the forest is all new. Long straight broad avenues go in all directions through it. The ground on these is as level as a lawn, and just as soft and green. Here is the Shamble Oak. Its weirdlike arms are still green, though it is said to be 1,700 years old, and may be more. The trunk, round which twelve good strides will hardly take you, is sadly gutted by fire. Some boys set it alight in trying to smoke out a hornet’s hive. Here, in this oak, it is said, Robin Hood hung his slaughtered deer, and, in more modern times, keepers and poachers used it as a larder.

A quaint and pretty log-hutà la Russehas recently been erected near the Shamble Oak. It is not yet furnished, but we found our way inside, the keeper in attendance here giving us great and impressive injunctions to wipe our feet and not step off the canvas. I wonder he did not bid us remove our shoes.

From the balcony of this log-hut one could have rabbit-shooting all day long, and pigeon-shooting in the evening. I hope no one ever will though.

We went home a different way, Mr Tebbet opening the double-padlocked gates for us. We passed the Parliament Tree, as it is called, where they tell us King John used to assemble his councillors. It is an oak still, a skeleton oak hung together by chains.

From the brow of a hill which we soon reached, we enjoyed a panorama, the like of which is not elsewhere to be seen in all broad England. From Howitt’s “Rural Life in England” I cull the following:

“Near Mansfield there remains a considerable wood, Harlowe Wood, and a fine scattering of old oaks near Berry Hill, in the same neighbourhood, but the greater part is now an open waste, stretching in a succession of low hills and long winding valleys, dark with heather. A few solitary and battered oaks standing here and there, the last melancholy remnants of these vast and ancient woods, the beautiful springs, swift and crystalline brooks, and broad sheets of water lying abroad amid the dark heath, and haunted by numbers of wild ducks and the heron, still remain. But at the Clipstone extremity of the forest, a remnant of its ancient woodlands remains, unrifled, except of its deer—a specimen of what the whole once was, and a specimen of consummate beauty and interest. Birkland and Bilhaghe taken together form a tract of land extending from Ollerton along the side of Thoresby Park, the seat of Earl Manvers, to Clipstone Park, of about five miles in length, and one or two in width. Bilhaghe is a forest of oaks, and is clothed with the most impressive aspect of age that can perhaps be presented to the eye in these kingdoms... A thousand years, ten thousand tempests, lightnings, winds, and wintry violence have all flung their utmost force on these trees, and there they stand, trunk after trunk, scathed, hollow, grey, and gnarled, stretching out their bare sturdy arms on their mingled foliage and ruin—a life in death. All is grey and old. The ground is grey beneath—the trees are grey with clinging lichens—the very heather and fern that spring beneath them have a character of the past.

“But Bilhaghe is only half of the forest-remains here; in a continuous line with it lies Birkland—a tract which bears its character in its name—the land of birches. It is a forest perfectly unique. It is equally ancient with Bilhaghe, but it has a less dilapidated air. It is a region of grace and poetry. I have seen many a wood, and many a wood of birches, and some of them amazingly beautiful, too, in one quarter or another of this fair island, but in England nothing that can compare with this... On all sides, standing in their solemn steadfastness, you see huge, gnarled, strangely-coloured and mossed oaks, some riven and laid bare from summit to root with the thunderbolts of past tempests. An immense tree is called the Shamble Oak, being said to be the one in which Robin Hood hung his slaughtered deer, but which was more probably used by the keepers for that purpose. By whomsoever it was so used, however, there still remain the hooks within its vast hollow.”

But it is time to be up and off. We lay last night in Mr Tebbet’s private meadow. Had a long walk before I could secure a suitable place. But the place was eminently quiet and exceedingly private, near lawns and gardens and giant elms. The elm that grows near the pretty cemetery, in which haymakers were so busy this morning, is, with the exception of the oak at Newstead Abbey gates, the finest ever I have seen; and yet an old man died but recently in Mansfield workhouse who remembered the time he could bend it to the ground.

Warsop, which we reached over rough and stony roads and steepish hills, is a greystone village, the houses slated or tiled blue or red, a fine church on the hilltop among lordly trees, a graveyard on the brae beneath with a white pathway meandering up through it to the porch.

At the sixth milestone we reached a hilltop, from which we could see into several counties. Such a view as this is worth wandering leagues to look at. We watered the horses here, at the last of the Duke of Portland’s lodges.

Thou down hill again. How lovely the little village of Cuckney looks down there, its crimson houses shimmering through the trees! We bought eggs at the inn called the Greendale Oak. There is a story attached to this oak which my reader has doubtless heard or read.

This is the land of oaks, and a smiling land too, a land of wealth and beauty, a great garden-land.

Chapter Ten.Doncaster—Brentley—Askern—Dinner on a Yorkshire Wold.“Was nought around save images of rest,Sleep-soothing groves, and quiet lawns between,And flowery beds, that slumberous influence kest,From poppies breathed, and beds of pleasant green.”It is the morning of the 4th July, and a bright and beautiful morning it is. The storm clouds that yesterday lowered all around us have cleared away and the sun shines in an Italian sky. We are encamped in a delightful little level meadow close to the worthy brewer and farmer to whom it belongs. How did we come here? Were we invited? No, reader, we invited ourselves.Not quite liking the accommodation recommended to us by a villager, I called on Mr E—, and coyly—shall I say “coyly?”—stated my case. Though good Mr E— has a wife to please, and the gentle, kindly lady is an invalid, he granted me the desired permission, and when we were fairly on the lawn and...A Page Missing Here.A Page Missing Here.stunted than the giants we have left behind us. Mulberry-trees have now made their appearance, and splendid acacias, tasselled over with drooping blooms. But the maple or plane-trees are also a sight; they are now in seed, and the hanging bunches of pods are tinted with carmine and brown.Large elder-bushes, like enormous white-rose trees, brighten the dark-green of the hedgerows; beds of yellow sweet-pea, beds and patches of the blue speedwell, the purple tapering stachys, solitary spikes of crimson foxglove, roses, and honeysuckle meet the eye wherever I look. In some places the sward is covered as with snow by the lavish-spreading fairy-bedstraw.At the little cosy town of Askern, with its capital hotels and civilised-looking lodging-houses, on stopping to shop, we were surprised at being surrounded by hosts of white-haired cripples—well, say lame people, for every one had a staff or a crutch.But I soon found out that Askern is a watering-place, a kind of a second-class Harrogate, and these people with the locks of snow had come to bathe and drink the waters; they are sulphureous. There is here a little lake, with a promenade and toy stalls. The lake has real water in it, though it looks somewhat green and greasy, and a real boat on it, and real oars to pull it. There are fish in the lake too. This is evident from the fact that a twenty-pound pike was lately landed. On being opened, his stomach was found to contain a roach and two copper coins of the reign of our present blessed Majesty the Queen. It is evident that this pike was laving up against a rainy day.But Askern is really a good resort for the invalid. Things are cheap, too, and the place would soon flourish if there were abundance of visitors.We have halted to dine in the centre of a Yorkshire wold. The road goes straight through the hedge-bound sward, and can be seen for miles either way.A wold means a wood—a wild wood. I like the word, there is a fine romantic ring about it. This wold has been cleared, or partially so, of trees, and fields of waving grain extend on all sides of us. Very delightful is this wold on a sweet summer’s day like this, but one can easily imagine how dreary the scene must be in winter, with the road banked high with snowdrifts, and the wind sweeping over the flats and tearing through the leafless oaks.The horses are enjoying the clover. Hurricane Bob and I are reclining among our rugs on the broadcoupé. Foley is cooking a fowl and a sheep’s heart; the latter for Bob’s dinner. There are rock-looking clouds on the horizon, a thunderstorm is within a measurable distance.How pretty those purple trailing vetches look! How sweet the song of yonder uprising lark! There is an odour of elder-flowers in the air. I hear a hen cackling at a distant farm. Probably the hen has laid an egg. Hurricane Bob is sound asleep. I think I shall read. Burns is by my elbow:“Oh, Nature! a’ thy shows and formsTo feeling pensive hearts hae charms!Whether the summer kindly warmsWi’ life and light,Or winter howls in gusty storms,The lang dark night.”How lovely those dog-roses are, though! They are everywhere to-day; roses in clusters, roses in garlands, wreaths and wind-tossed spray, white, crimson, or palest pink roses—roses—“The dinner is all on the table, sir.”“Aw—right.”“The dinner isquite ready, sir.”“To be sure, to be sure. Thank you, Foley.”“Why, you have been sound asleep, sir.”We are once more settled for the night and settled for the Sabbath, in a delightful clovery meadow near a fine old Yorkshire farm, round which blue-rock pigeons are flying in clouds.A herd of fine shorthorn cows have arranged themselves in a row to look at us. A healthful “caller” country lassie is milking one. Her name is Mary; I heard a ploughboy say “Mary” to her. Mary is singing low as she milks, and the sleek-sided cow is chewing her cud and meditating.Yonder is a field of white peas all in bloom, and yonder a field of pale-green flax.It must be a great satisfaction for those pigeons to see those peas in bloom.“Good-night, Mary.”“Good-night, sir.”Away marches Mary, singing, “Tra, la, lalla, la lah.”What a sweet voice the little maiden has!

“Was nought around save images of rest,Sleep-soothing groves, and quiet lawns between,And flowery beds, that slumberous influence kest,From poppies breathed, and beds of pleasant green.”

“Was nought around save images of rest,Sleep-soothing groves, and quiet lawns between,And flowery beds, that slumberous influence kest,From poppies breathed, and beds of pleasant green.”

It is the morning of the 4th July, and a bright and beautiful morning it is. The storm clouds that yesterday lowered all around us have cleared away and the sun shines in an Italian sky. We are encamped in a delightful little level meadow close to the worthy brewer and farmer to whom it belongs. How did we come here? Were we invited? No, reader, we invited ourselves.

Not quite liking the accommodation recommended to us by a villager, I called on Mr E—, and coyly—shall I say “coyly?”—stated my case. Though good Mr E— has a wife to please, and the gentle, kindly lady is an invalid, he granted me the desired permission, and when we were fairly on the lawn and...

A Page Missing Here.

A Page Missing Here.

stunted than the giants we have left behind us. Mulberry-trees have now made their appearance, and splendid acacias, tasselled over with drooping blooms. But the maple or plane-trees are also a sight; they are now in seed, and the hanging bunches of pods are tinted with carmine and brown.

Large elder-bushes, like enormous white-rose trees, brighten the dark-green of the hedgerows; beds of yellow sweet-pea, beds and patches of the blue speedwell, the purple tapering stachys, solitary spikes of crimson foxglove, roses, and honeysuckle meet the eye wherever I look. In some places the sward is covered as with snow by the lavish-spreading fairy-bedstraw.

At the little cosy town of Askern, with its capital hotels and civilised-looking lodging-houses, on stopping to shop, we were surprised at being surrounded by hosts of white-haired cripples—well, say lame people, for every one had a staff or a crutch.

But I soon found out that Askern is a watering-place, a kind of a second-class Harrogate, and these people with the locks of snow had come to bathe and drink the waters; they are sulphureous. There is here a little lake, with a promenade and toy stalls. The lake has real water in it, though it looks somewhat green and greasy, and a real boat on it, and real oars to pull it. There are fish in the lake too. This is evident from the fact that a twenty-pound pike was lately landed. On being opened, his stomach was found to contain a roach and two copper coins of the reign of our present blessed Majesty the Queen. It is evident that this pike was laving up against a rainy day.

But Askern is really a good resort for the invalid. Things are cheap, too, and the place would soon flourish if there were abundance of visitors.

We have halted to dine in the centre of a Yorkshire wold. The road goes straight through the hedge-bound sward, and can be seen for miles either way.

A wold means a wood—a wild wood. I like the word, there is a fine romantic ring about it. This wold has been cleared, or partially so, of trees, and fields of waving grain extend on all sides of us. Very delightful is this wold on a sweet summer’s day like this, but one can easily imagine how dreary the scene must be in winter, with the road banked high with snowdrifts, and the wind sweeping over the flats and tearing through the leafless oaks.

The horses are enjoying the clover. Hurricane Bob and I are reclining among our rugs on the broadcoupé. Foley is cooking a fowl and a sheep’s heart; the latter for Bob’s dinner. There are rock-looking clouds on the horizon, a thunderstorm is within a measurable distance.

How pretty those purple trailing vetches look! How sweet the song of yonder uprising lark! There is an odour of elder-flowers in the air. I hear a hen cackling at a distant farm. Probably the hen has laid an egg. Hurricane Bob is sound asleep. I think I shall read. Burns is by my elbow:

“Oh, Nature! a’ thy shows and formsTo feeling pensive hearts hae charms!Whether the summer kindly warmsWi’ life and light,Or winter howls in gusty storms,The lang dark night.”

“Oh, Nature! a’ thy shows and formsTo feeling pensive hearts hae charms!Whether the summer kindly warmsWi’ life and light,Or winter howls in gusty storms,The lang dark night.”

How lovely those dog-roses are, though! They are everywhere to-day; roses in clusters, roses in garlands, wreaths and wind-tossed spray, white, crimson, or palest pink roses—roses—

“The dinner is all on the table, sir.”

“Aw—right.”

“The dinner isquite ready, sir.”

“To be sure, to be sure. Thank you, Foley.”

“Why, you have been sound asleep, sir.”

We are once more settled for the night and settled for the Sabbath, in a delightful clovery meadow near a fine old Yorkshire farm, round which blue-rock pigeons are flying in clouds.

A herd of fine shorthorn cows have arranged themselves in a row to look at us. A healthful “caller” country lassie is milking one. Her name is Mary; I heard a ploughboy say “Mary” to her. Mary is singing low as she milks, and the sleek-sided cow is chewing her cud and meditating.

Yonder is a field of white peas all in bloom, and yonder a field of pale-green flax.

It must be a great satisfaction for those pigeons to see those peas in bloom.

“Good-night, Mary.”

“Good-night, sir.”

Away marches Mary, singing, “Tra, la, lalla, la lah.”

What a sweet voice the little maiden has!

Chapter Eleven.A Day in the Life of a Gentleman Gipsy.“He journeyed on like errant-knight the while,While sweetly the summer sun did smileOn mountain moss and moor.”It has occurred to me that a slightly more detailed account of the internal economy of our land-yacht, the Wanderer, might not prove devoid of interest to the reader, and I cannot give this in an easier way to myself, nor more completely, than by describing a day in the life of a gentleman gipsy.It is the ninth of July, and early morning. The belfry-clock, which we can see from the meadow in which we have been lying all night, will presently chime out the quarter-past six. Foley is busy erecting the after-tent under which I have my bath every morning, as sure as sunrise. In a few minutes, ere ever I have finished my toilet, our coachman will be here for oats and beans for Corn-flower and Pea-blossom. No fear that John will neglect his horses, he is quite as kind to them as I myself am to Bob and Polly, and now that Pear-blossom’s fetlock is slightly strained, it is three times a day most carefully bandaged and rubbed with healing liniment.The bed which is made every night on the sofa is not yet taken up, but as soon as I emerge from the back door and enter the tent my valet enters by the saloon front door, the bedclothes are carried outside, carefully shaken and folded, and finally stowed away under the lockers. The saloon is then brushed and dusted and the cloth laid for breakfast.Bob sleeps on the driving apron in the corner of the saloon, Polly in her cage occupies another corner. The first thing I do every morning is to hang Polly under the balcony, and chain Bob on thecoupé, wrapping him in his red blanket if the weather be chilly. He is there now; ominous warning growls are followed by fierce barking, for some one is nearing the caravan whose looks Bob does not like, or whose movements he deems suspicious. At every bark of the brave dog the van shakes and the lamp-glasses rattle.I have finished shaving—water boiled by spirits-of-wine.“The bath all ready? thank you, Foley.”Do not imagine that I carry an immense tin-ware bath in the Wanderer. No, a gipsy’s bath is a very simple arrangement, but it is very delightful. This is themodus operandi. I have a great sponge and a bucket of cold water, newly drawn from the nearest well. This morning the water is actually ice-cold, but I am hungry before I have finished sponging, so benefit must result from so bracing an ablution.Foley has laid the cloth. The kettle is boiling, the eggs and rashers are ready to put in the frying-pan, the Rippingille oil-stove is in a little tent made of mats under the caravan. There is nothing in the shape of cooking this stove will not perform.Now Bob must have his early run, and while I am walking with him I call a bunch of the seedling grasses Polly loves so well, for I believe with Norman McLeod, D.D. “I think nothing of that man’s religion,” said that truly great and good man, “whose cat and dog are not the better for it.”We have not a caravan cat, but Polly is an excellent substitute.I return and once more fasten Bob on thecoupé, but he now insists on having the front door open that he may watch me at breakfast, and get the tit-bits. How bright, and clean, and pleasant the saloon looks! There are garden flowers in the crystal boat, and a splendid bouquet of wild flowers and ferns that I culled in the woods yesterday morning stands in the bracket beneath one of the windows; crimson foxgloves there are, rare and beautiful ox-eye daisies, and a score of others of every colour and shade.The sun is streaming in through the panes and shimmering on the red lamp-glasses; the table is laid to perfection, the tea is fragrant, the eggs and bacon done to a turn, and the bread as white as snow. The milk, too, is newly from that very cow who was playing the trombone so noisily last night in the meadow near me, and the butter all that could be desired. And yet some of these dainties are wondrous cheap up here in Yorks; for that butter we paid but eleven pence a pound, fourteen new-laid eggs we secured for a shilling, the bacon cost but sixpence, while three halfpence buys me a jugful of the richest of milk. Who would not be a gipsy?But breakfast is soon discussed and everything cleared away, the spoons and dishes are washed beneath the tent, the hind tables having been let down to facilitate matters. In half an hour or less the pantry is as bright and tidy as eye could wish to see. The tent itself is taken down and stowed away, the ladder is shipped and secured, buckets and mats, and nosebags and chains, fastened beneath the caravan, then the steps are put up, and the after-door closed and locked. The horses are now put-to; I myself have one last walk round the Wanderer to see that everything is in its place and no drawer left unlocked, then away we rattle right gaily O!To-day the gate that leads to the meadow is narrow, it does not give us two inches to spare at each side. I have to walk backwards in front of the horses to guide the coachman in his exit. But John has a keen eye, and in a few moments we are in the road.Nothing has been forgotten, and the landlord of the Stalled Ox gives us kindly good morning and wishes usbon voyage. More than one friendly hand is waved, too, and some hats are lifted, for the good people, having soon settled in their minds that we were neither in the Cheap-Jack line nor Salvation soldiers, have promoted me to the dignity of baronet. This is nothing new. Some scions of nobility are actually caravanning around somewhere, and I am often supposed to be one of them.I travelincog, and do not care whom I am taken for, whether Cheap-Jack, noble earl, or political agent. I now let down the front seat, and Hurricane Bob withdraws to the quiet seclusion of the pantry, where he rests on cushions to fend him from the jolting.Pea-blossom invariably nudges Corn-flower with her nose before starting. This is to make him straighten out and take the first pull at the caravan. He never refuses, and once it is in motion they both settle soberly down to their work.Foley is on ahead with the tricycle—some hundred yards. This is a judicious and handy arrangement. We hardly know how we should have done without our smart and beautiful Ranelagh Club machine.The day will be a warm one. It is now eight o’clock, the road is level and firm, and we hope to reach Darlington—sixteen miles—to-night.The country is flat again, but the landscape is bounded by far-off blue hills.The roses still accompany us in the hedgerows. There is even a greater wealth of them to-day than usual, while the sward at each side of our path still looks like a garden laid out in beds and patches of brightest colours.There is nothing of very special interest to view in this long town of Northallerton, not in the streets at all events. Last night, though, we were visited by hundreds of well-dressed people; many of these were really beautiful girls, though here the beauty is of a different type from that you find far south. More of the Saxon probably, and a sprinkling of the auburn-haired Dane.For weeks I have cared but little how the world wagged. With an apathy and listlessness born of bracing air and sunshine, I have troubled myself not at all about foreign wars or the fall of governments, but to-day I have invested in aYorkshire Post. I arrange my rags on thecoupé, and lying down, dreamily scan my paper as the horses go trotting along. I have plenty of work to do if I choose, bundles of proofs to correct from my publishers, but—I’ll do it by-and-bye. By-and-bye is a gipsy’s motto. There is no news in this day’s paper. What care I that Oko Jumbo has departed, or that there has been a royal visit to Leeds? Bah! I fold the thing up and pitch it to a cow-boy. Had it fallen in that cow-boy’s mouth it would hardly have filled it.The road is silent and almost deserted, so we see but few people saving those who run to their garden gates, or peep from behind the geraniums in windows.But it is most pleasant lolling here on such a glorious morning, and the veriest trifles that I notice in passing awaken a kind of drowsy interest in my mind.In proof of this let me mention a few. A country boy playing with a collie puppy. Puppy nearly gets run over. Agony and anxiety of country boy. Red-tiled brick cottages peeping up through orchards. Red-tiled cottages everywhere, by hedgerows, by brook-sides, in meadows, on morsels of moorland. A sweep in full costume, brush and all, standing glaring from under a broad Scotch bonnet. A yellow-haired wee lassie standing in a doorway eating a slice of bread; she has not finished her toilet, for she wears but one stocking, the other shapely leg is bare. Great banks of elder-trees covered with snowy blossoms. A quiet and pretty farm-steading near the road, its garden ablaze with crimson valerian. Milch cows in the adjacent meadow, ankle-deep in yellow celandine and daisies. A flock of lambs in a field lying down under the shade of a great sycamore, the sycamore itself a sight worth seeing.And now we are on the top of Lovesome Hill. What a charming name, by the way! Spread out before and beneath us is a large and fertile plain, fields and woodlands, as far as ever the eye can reach, all slumbering in the sweet summer sunshine. In the distance a train is speeding along, we can trace it by its trailing smoke. I had almost forgotten we lived in the days of railway trains. There is a redbrick village on the hilltop straight ahead of us.That must be Smeaton. Smeaton? Yes, now I remember, and the lovely fertile plain yonder, that now looks so green and smiling, hides in its bosom the dust of an army. History tells us that ten thousand Scotchmen were there slain. I can fancy the terrible tulzie, I can people that plain even now in imagination with men in battle array; I see the banners wave, and hear the border slogan cry:“And now at weapon-point they close,Scarce can they hear or see their foes;They close in clouds of smoke and dust,With sword’s-sway and lance’s thrust;And such a yell was there,Of sudden and portentous birth,As if man fought upon the earth,And fiends in upper air.Oh! life and death were in the shout,And triumph and despair.”(The Battle of the Standard, fought in 1138, in which the Scottish army was routed, and the flower of the land left dead on the field.)But here we are in Smeaton itself—grass or a garden at every cottage. This village would make a capital health resort. We stop to water the horses, and though it is hardly ten o’clock I feel hungry already.Clear of the village, and on and on. A nice old lady in spectacles tending cows and knitting, singing low to herself as she does so. An awful-looking old man, in awful-looking goggles, breaking stones by the roadside. I address the awful-looking old man.“Awful-looking old man,” I say, “did ever you hear of the Battle of the Standard?”“Naa.”“Did you never hear or read that a battle was fought near this spot?”The awful-looking old man scratched his head.“Coome ta think on’t noo, there was summut o’ th’ kind, but it’s soome years agone. There war more ’n a hoondred cocks. A regular main as ye might call it.”I pass on and leave the old man muttering to himself. Pinewoods on our right mingling with the lighter green of the feathery larches. A thundercloud hanging over a town in the plains far away. A duck-pond completely surrounded by trailing roses. Ducks in the pond all head down, tails and yellow feet up. Road suddenly becomes a lovers’ lane, charmingly pretty, and robins are singing in the copses. We are just five miles from Darlington.We stable our horses at a roadside inn and Foley cooks the dinner.How very handy sheets of paper come in! Look at that snow-white tablecloth—that is paper; so is the temporary crumb-cloth, and eke my table-napkin; but in fifty other ways in a caravan paper is useful.The dinner to-day is cold roast beef and floury new potatoes; add to this a delightful salad, and we have amenua millionaire might not despise.I write up my log while dinner is cooking, and after that meal has been discussed comes the hour for reading and siesta.Now the horses are once more put-to, and we start again for Darlington. We pass through the charming village of Croft; it lies on the banks of the Tees, and is a spa of some kind, and well worthy of being a better-frequented resort for the health or pleasure seeker.The treescapes, the wood and water peeps, are fine just before you reach Darlington. This town itself is one of the prettiest in England. Fully as big but infinitely more beautiful even than Reading.Wherever we stop we are surrounded by people, so we make haste to shake the dust of civilisation from our carriage-wheels, and are happy when we once more breathe country air, and see neither perambulators nor boarding-school girls.At the top of a hill some two miles out of town we come upon a cosy wee hotel—the Harrogate Hill Hotel.“A’ve little convenience,” says the landlord, in his broad Durham brogue, “but A’ll clear anoother stall, and A’ll turn t’ould pony oot o’ his. A’ll mak’ room.”And the Wanderer is steered up a narrow lane and safely landed in a tiny meadow, o’ergrown with rank green grass and docks and sheltered with fine elms and ashes. And here we lie to-night.Supper will soon be ready. I shall have a ride on my tricycle; there is always something to see; then beds will be made, shutters put up. I will read and write, while Foley in his cabin will write up his road-log, and by eleven every one on board will be wrapped, we hope, in dreamless slumber.This then is a true and faithful account of one day in the life of a gentleman gipsy. Quiet and uneventful, but very pleasant, almost idyllic.Do you care for the picture, reader?

“He journeyed on like errant-knight the while,While sweetly the summer sun did smileOn mountain moss and moor.”

“He journeyed on like errant-knight the while,While sweetly the summer sun did smileOn mountain moss and moor.”

It has occurred to me that a slightly more detailed account of the internal economy of our land-yacht, the Wanderer, might not prove devoid of interest to the reader, and I cannot give this in an easier way to myself, nor more completely, than by describing a day in the life of a gentleman gipsy.

It is the ninth of July, and early morning. The belfry-clock, which we can see from the meadow in which we have been lying all night, will presently chime out the quarter-past six. Foley is busy erecting the after-tent under which I have my bath every morning, as sure as sunrise. In a few minutes, ere ever I have finished my toilet, our coachman will be here for oats and beans for Corn-flower and Pea-blossom. No fear that John will neglect his horses, he is quite as kind to them as I myself am to Bob and Polly, and now that Pear-blossom’s fetlock is slightly strained, it is three times a day most carefully bandaged and rubbed with healing liniment.

The bed which is made every night on the sofa is not yet taken up, but as soon as I emerge from the back door and enter the tent my valet enters by the saloon front door, the bedclothes are carried outside, carefully shaken and folded, and finally stowed away under the lockers. The saloon is then brushed and dusted and the cloth laid for breakfast.

Bob sleeps on the driving apron in the corner of the saloon, Polly in her cage occupies another corner. The first thing I do every morning is to hang Polly under the balcony, and chain Bob on thecoupé, wrapping him in his red blanket if the weather be chilly. He is there now; ominous warning growls are followed by fierce barking, for some one is nearing the caravan whose looks Bob does not like, or whose movements he deems suspicious. At every bark of the brave dog the van shakes and the lamp-glasses rattle.

I have finished shaving—water boiled by spirits-of-wine.

“The bath all ready? thank you, Foley.”

Do not imagine that I carry an immense tin-ware bath in the Wanderer. No, a gipsy’s bath is a very simple arrangement, but it is very delightful. This is themodus operandi. I have a great sponge and a bucket of cold water, newly drawn from the nearest well. This morning the water is actually ice-cold, but I am hungry before I have finished sponging, so benefit must result from so bracing an ablution.

Foley has laid the cloth. The kettle is boiling, the eggs and rashers are ready to put in the frying-pan, the Rippingille oil-stove is in a little tent made of mats under the caravan. There is nothing in the shape of cooking this stove will not perform.

Now Bob must have his early run, and while I am walking with him I call a bunch of the seedling grasses Polly loves so well, for I believe with Norman McLeod, D.D. “I think nothing of that man’s religion,” said that truly great and good man, “whose cat and dog are not the better for it.”

We have not a caravan cat, but Polly is an excellent substitute.

I return and once more fasten Bob on thecoupé, but he now insists on having the front door open that he may watch me at breakfast, and get the tit-bits. How bright, and clean, and pleasant the saloon looks! There are garden flowers in the crystal boat, and a splendid bouquet of wild flowers and ferns that I culled in the woods yesterday morning stands in the bracket beneath one of the windows; crimson foxgloves there are, rare and beautiful ox-eye daisies, and a score of others of every colour and shade.

The sun is streaming in through the panes and shimmering on the red lamp-glasses; the table is laid to perfection, the tea is fragrant, the eggs and bacon done to a turn, and the bread as white as snow. The milk, too, is newly from that very cow who was playing the trombone so noisily last night in the meadow near me, and the butter all that could be desired. And yet some of these dainties are wondrous cheap up here in Yorks; for that butter we paid but eleven pence a pound, fourteen new-laid eggs we secured for a shilling, the bacon cost but sixpence, while three halfpence buys me a jugful of the richest of milk. Who would not be a gipsy?

But breakfast is soon discussed and everything cleared away, the spoons and dishes are washed beneath the tent, the hind tables having been let down to facilitate matters. In half an hour or less the pantry is as bright and tidy as eye could wish to see. The tent itself is taken down and stowed away, the ladder is shipped and secured, buckets and mats, and nosebags and chains, fastened beneath the caravan, then the steps are put up, and the after-door closed and locked. The horses are now put-to; I myself have one last walk round the Wanderer to see that everything is in its place and no drawer left unlocked, then away we rattle right gaily O!

To-day the gate that leads to the meadow is narrow, it does not give us two inches to spare at each side. I have to walk backwards in front of the horses to guide the coachman in his exit. But John has a keen eye, and in a few moments we are in the road.

Nothing has been forgotten, and the landlord of the Stalled Ox gives us kindly good morning and wishes usbon voyage. More than one friendly hand is waved, too, and some hats are lifted, for the good people, having soon settled in their minds that we were neither in the Cheap-Jack line nor Salvation soldiers, have promoted me to the dignity of baronet. This is nothing new. Some scions of nobility are actually caravanning around somewhere, and I am often supposed to be one of them.

I travelincog, and do not care whom I am taken for, whether Cheap-Jack, noble earl, or political agent. I now let down the front seat, and Hurricane Bob withdraws to the quiet seclusion of the pantry, where he rests on cushions to fend him from the jolting.

Pea-blossom invariably nudges Corn-flower with her nose before starting. This is to make him straighten out and take the first pull at the caravan. He never refuses, and once it is in motion they both settle soberly down to their work.

Foley is on ahead with the tricycle—some hundred yards. This is a judicious and handy arrangement. We hardly know how we should have done without our smart and beautiful Ranelagh Club machine.

The day will be a warm one. It is now eight o’clock, the road is level and firm, and we hope to reach Darlington—sixteen miles—to-night.

The country is flat again, but the landscape is bounded by far-off blue hills.

The roses still accompany us in the hedgerows. There is even a greater wealth of them to-day than usual, while the sward at each side of our path still looks like a garden laid out in beds and patches of brightest colours.

There is nothing of very special interest to view in this long town of Northallerton, not in the streets at all events. Last night, though, we were visited by hundreds of well-dressed people; many of these were really beautiful girls, though here the beauty is of a different type from that you find far south. More of the Saxon probably, and a sprinkling of the auburn-haired Dane.

For weeks I have cared but little how the world wagged. With an apathy and listlessness born of bracing air and sunshine, I have troubled myself not at all about foreign wars or the fall of governments, but to-day I have invested in aYorkshire Post. I arrange my rags on thecoupé, and lying down, dreamily scan my paper as the horses go trotting along. I have plenty of work to do if I choose, bundles of proofs to correct from my publishers, but—I’ll do it by-and-bye. By-and-bye is a gipsy’s motto. There is no news in this day’s paper. What care I that Oko Jumbo has departed, or that there has been a royal visit to Leeds? Bah! I fold the thing up and pitch it to a cow-boy. Had it fallen in that cow-boy’s mouth it would hardly have filled it.

The road is silent and almost deserted, so we see but few people saving those who run to their garden gates, or peep from behind the geraniums in windows.

But it is most pleasant lolling here on such a glorious morning, and the veriest trifles that I notice in passing awaken a kind of drowsy interest in my mind.

In proof of this let me mention a few. A country boy playing with a collie puppy. Puppy nearly gets run over. Agony and anxiety of country boy. Red-tiled brick cottages peeping up through orchards. Red-tiled cottages everywhere, by hedgerows, by brook-sides, in meadows, on morsels of moorland. A sweep in full costume, brush and all, standing glaring from under a broad Scotch bonnet. A yellow-haired wee lassie standing in a doorway eating a slice of bread; she has not finished her toilet, for she wears but one stocking, the other shapely leg is bare. Great banks of elder-trees covered with snowy blossoms. A quiet and pretty farm-steading near the road, its garden ablaze with crimson valerian. Milch cows in the adjacent meadow, ankle-deep in yellow celandine and daisies. A flock of lambs in a field lying down under the shade of a great sycamore, the sycamore itself a sight worth seeing.

And now we are on the top of Lovesome Hill. What a charming name, by the way! Spread out before and beneath us is a large and fertile plain, fields and woodlands, as far as ever the eye can reach, all slumbering in the sweet summer sunshine. In the distance a train is speeding along, we can trace it by its trailing smoke. I had almost forgotten we lived in the days of railway trains. There is a redbrick village on the hilltop straight ahead of us.

That must be Smeaton. Smeaton? Yes, now I remember, and the lovely fertile plain yonder, that now looks so green and smiling, hides in its bosom the dust of an army. History tells us that ten thousand Scotchmen were there slain. I can fancy the terrible tulzie, I can people that plain even now in imagination with men in battle array; I see the banners wave, and hear the border slogan cry:

“And now at weapon-point they close,Scarce can they hear or see their foes;They close in clouds of smoke and dust,With sword’s-sway and lance’s thrust;And such a yell was there,Of sudden and portentous birth,As if man fought upon the earth,And fiends in upper air.Oh! life and death were in the shout,And triumph and despair.”

“And now at weapon-point they close,Scarce can they hear or see their foes;They close in clouds of smoke and dust,With sword’s-sway and lance’s thrust;And such a yell was there,Of sudden and portentous birth,As if man fought upon the earth,And fiends in upper air.Oh! life and death were in the shout,And triumph and despair.”

(The Battle of the Standard, fought in 1138, in which the Scottish army was routed, and the flower of the land left dead on the field.)

But here we are in Smeaton itself—grass or a garden at every cottage. This village would make a capital health resort. We stop to water the horses, and though it is hardly ten o’clock I feel hungry already.

Clear of the village, and on and on. A nice old lady in spectacles tending cows and knitting, singing low to herself as she does so. An awful-looking old man, in awful-looking goggles, breaking stones by the roadside. I address the awful-looking old man.

“Awful-looking old man,” I say, “did ever you hear of the Battle of the Standard?”

“Naa.”

“Did you never hear or read that a battle was fought near this spot?”

The awful-looking old man scratched his head.

“Coome ta think on’t noo, there was summut o’ th’ kind, but it’s soome years agone. There war more ’n a hoondred cocks. A regular main as ye might call it.”

I pass on and leave the old man muttering to himself. Pinewoods on our right mingling with the lighter green of the feathery larches. A thundercloud hanging over a town in the plains far away. A duck-pond completely surrounded by trailing roses. Ducks in the pond all head down, tails and yellow feet up. Road suddenly becomes a lovers’ lane, charmingly pretty, and robins are singing in the copses. We are just five miles from Darlington.

We stable our horses at a roadside inn and Foley cooks the dinner.

How very handy sheets of paper come in! Look at that snow-white tablecloth—that is paper; so is the temporary crumb-cloth, and eke my table-napkin; but in fifty other ways in a caravan paper is useful.

The dinner to-day is cold roast beef and floury new potatoes; add to this a delightful salad, and we have amenua millionaire might not despise.

I write up my log while dinner is cooking, and after that meal has been discussed comes the hour for reading and siesta.

Now the horses are once more put-to, and we start again for Darlington. We pass through the charming village of Croft; it lies on the banks of the Tees, and is a spa of some kind, and well worthy of being a better-frequented resort for the health or pleasure seeker.

The treescapes, the wood and water peeps, are fine just before you reach Darlington. This town itself is one of the prettiest in England. Fully as big but infinitely more beautiful even than Reading.

Wherever we stop we are surrounded by people, so we make haste to shake the dust of civilisation from our carriage-wheels, and are happy when we once more breathe country air, and see neither perambulators nor boarding-school girls.

At the top of a hill some two miles out of town we come upon a cosy wee hotel—the Harrogate Hill Hotel.

“A’ve little convenience,” says the landlord, in his broad Durham brogue, “but A’ll clear anoother stall, and A’ll turn t’ould pony oot o’ his. A’ll mak’ room.”

And the Wanderer is steered up a narrow lane and safely landed in a tiny meadow, o’ergrown with rank green grass and docks and sheltered with fine elms and ashes. And here we lie to-night.

Supper will soon be ready. I shall have a ride on my tricycle; there is always something to see; then beds will be made, shutters put up. I will read and write, while Foley in his cabin will write up his road-log, and by eleven every one on board will be wrapped, we hope, in dreamless slumber.

This then is a true and faithful account of one day in the life of a gentleman gipsy. Quiet and uneventful, but very pleasant, almost idyllic.

Do you care for the picture, reader?

Chapter Twelve.At Durham—The British Miner at Home—Gosforth—Among Northumbrian Banks—Across the Tweed.“March! march! Ettrick and Teviotdale,Why, my lads, dinna ye march forward in order?March! march! Eskdale and Liddesdale,All the blue bonnets are over the border.Many a banner spread flutters above your head;Many a crest that is famous in story;Mount and make ready then,Sons of the mountain glen:Fight for your Queen, and the old Scottish glory!”July 11th.A six-miles’ drive, through some of the most charming scenery in England, brought us into Durham. The city looks very imposing from the hilltop; its noble old castle, and grand yet solemn looking cathedral. Eight hundred years of age! What a terrible story they could tell could those grey old piles but speak! It would be a very sad one to listen to. Perhaps they do talk to each other at the midnight hour, when the city is hushed and still.It would take one a week, or even a fortnight, to see all the sights about Durham; he would hardly in that time, methinks, be tired of the walks around the town and by the banks of the winding Weir.It is a rolling country, a hilly land around here. The people, by the way, call those hills banks. We had a hard day. John’s gloves were torn with the reins, for driving was no joke. I fear, however, the horses hardly enjoyed the scenery.The streets in Durham are badly paved and dangerously steep. We did not dare to bring the Wanderer through, therefore, but made a sylvandétourand got on the north road again beyond.If we reckoned upon encamping last night in a cosy meadow once more we were mistaken, we were glad to get standing room close to the road and behind a little public-house.Miners going home from their work in the evening passed us in scores. I cannot say they look picturesque, but they are blithe and active, and would make capital soldiers. Their legs were bare from their knees downwards, their hats were skull-caps, and all visible flesh was as black almost as a nigger’s.Many of these miners, washed and dressed, returned to this public-house, drank and gambled till eleven, then went outside and fought cruelly.The long rows of grey-slab houses one passes on leaving Durham by road do not look inviting. For miles we passed through a mining district, a kind of black country—a country, however, that would be pleasant enough, with its rolling hills, its fine trees and wild hedgerows, were it not for the dirt and squalor and poverty one sees signs of everywhere on the road. Every one and everything looks grey and grimy, and many of the children, but especially the women, have a woebegone, grief-stricken look that tells its own tale.I greatly fear that intemperance is rampant enough in some of these villages, and the weaker members of the family have to suffer for it.Here is an old wrinkled yellow woman sitting on a doorstep. She is smoking a short black clay, perhaps her only comfort in life. A rough-looking man, with a beard of one week’s growth, appears behind and rudely stirs her with his foot. She totters up and nearly falls as he brushes past unheeding.Yonder are two tiny girls, also sitting on a doorstep—one about seven, the other little more than a baby. An inebriated man—can it be the father?—comes along the street and stops in front of them. He wants to get in.“Git oot o’ t’way!” he shouts to the oldest.His leg is half lifted as if to kick.“And thou too,”—this to the baby.One can easily imagine what sort of a home those poor children have. It cannot be a very happy one.More pleasant to notice now a window brilliant with flowers, and a clean and tidy woman rubbing the panes.On and on through beautiful scenery, with peeps at many a noble mansion in the distance. Only the landscape is disfigured by unsightly mine machinery, and the trees are all a-blur with the smoky haze that lies around them.The country around the village of Birtley is also very pretty. A mile beyond from the hilltop the view is grand, and well worth all this tiring day’s drag to look upon.Everywhere on the roadside are groups of miners out of work, lying on the grass asleep or talking.The dust is trying to the nerves to-day; such a black dust it is, too.We stop at Birtley. I trust I shall never stop there again.“No, there is no stabling here;” thus spoke a slattern whom I addressed.“Water t’ hosses. Dost think I’d give thee water? Go and look for t’ well.”Some drunken miners crowded round.“For two pins,” one said, “I’d kick the horses. Smartly I would.”He thought better of it, however.We pushed on in hopes of getting stabling and perhaps a little civility.We pushed on right through Gateshead and Newcastle, and three miles farther to the pleasant village of Gosforth, before we found either.Gosforth is a village of villas, and here we have found all the comfort a gipsy’s heart could desire.We are encamped on a breezy common in sight of the Cheviot Hills, and here we will lie till Tuesday morning for the sake of our horses if not ourselves.I shall never forget the kindly welcome I received here from the Spanish Consul.July 14th.—Down tumbled the mercury yesterday morning, and down came the rain in torrents, the rattling, rushing noise it made on the roof of the Wanderer being every now and then drowned in the pealing of the thunder. But this morning the air is delightfully cool, the sky is bright, the atmosphere clear, and a gentle breeze is blowing.Left Gosforth early. The country at first was somewhat flat, sparsely treed, well cultivated and clean.The first village we passed through is called, I think, Three Mile Bridge. It is quite a mining place, far from wholesome, but the children looked healthy, a fact which is due, doubtless, to the bracing, pure air they breathe. All are bare-legged and shoeless, from the lad or lass of fifteen down to the month-old kicking baby.Came to a splendid park and lodge-gates, the latter surmounted by two bulls couchant; I do not care to know to whom the domain belongs.I find it is best not to be told who lives in the beautiful mansions I am passing every day in my journey due north. I can people them all in imagination. A name might banish every morsel of romance from the finest castle that peeps through the greenery of trees in some glen, or stands boldly out in the sunshine of some steep hill or braeland.By eleven o’clock we had done ten miles and entered Morpeth.Now, O ye health-seekers or intending honeymoon enjoyers! why not go for a month to Morpeth? It lies on the banks of the winding Wansbeck, it is but four miles from the ocean; it is quaint, quiet, curious, hills everywhere, wood and water everywhere; it has the remains of a grand old castle on the hill top, and a gaol that looks like one. Accommodation? did you say. What a sublunary thought, but Morpeth has capital lodging-houses and good inns, so there!We caught our first glimpse of the sea to-day away on our right.We had hoped to stay at Felton, a romantic little village on the river. Partly in a deep dell it lies, partly on a hill; rocks and wooded knolls with shady walks by the streamlet-side make it well suited for a summer resort, but it is hardly known. Not to Londoners, certainly.Stabling we could have here, but so hilly is the place that a flat meadow was looked for in vain. After spending a whole hour searching for accommodation I returned to the glen where I had left the Wanderer, and our poor tired horses had to go on again.Hills, hills, hills, that seemed as if they never would end; hills that take the heart, and life, and spirit out of the horses and make my heart bleed for them. The beauty of the scenery cannot comfort me now, nor the glory of the wild flowers, nor the blue sea itself. We but lag along, hoping, praying, that a hostelry of some sort may soon heave in sight.I am riding on in front, having often to dismount and push my cycle before me.All at once on a hilltop, with a beautiful green valley stretching away and away towards the sea, I come upon the cosiest wee Northumbrian inn ever I wish to see. I signal back the joyful tidings to the weary Wanderer.Yee, there is stabling, and hay, and straw, and everything that can be desired.“Hurrah! Come on, Bob, I feel as happy now as a gipsy king.”July 15th.—The drag began this morning in earnest. We were among the banks of Northumbria. (Bank—a stiff hill.) With a light carriage they are bad enough, but with a two-ton waggon, small in wheel and long ’twixt draughts, the labour, not to say danger, reaches a maximum. The country here is what a cockney would term a mountainous one, and in some parts of it even a Scotchman would feel inclined to agree with him. At one time we would be down at the bottom of some gloomy defile, where the road crossed over a Gothic bridge, and a wimpling stream went laughing over its rocky bed till lost to sight among overhanging trees.Down in that defile we would eye with anxious hearts the terrible climb before us.“Can we do it?” That is the question.“We must try.” That is the answer.The roller is fastened carefully behind a back wheel, and “Hip!” away we go, the horses tearing, tottering, scraping, almost falling.And now we are up, and pause to look thankfully, fearfully back while the horses stand panting, the sweat running in streamlets over their hoofs.The short banks are more easily rushed. It is a long steep hill that puts us in danger.There is hardly probably a worse hill or a more dangerous hollow than that just past the castle gate of Alnwick.It needed a stout heart to try the descent. Easy indeed that descent would have been had a horse fallen, for neither the brake, which I now had sole charge of, nor the skid, could have prevented the great van from launching downwards.But the ascent was still more fraught with danger. It was like climbing a roof top. Could the horses do it this time?Impossible. They stagger half way up, they stagger and claw the awful hill, andstop.No, not stop, for see, the caravan has taken charge and is moving backwards, dragging the horses down.The roller and a huge stone beneath the wheels prevented an ugly accident and the complete wreck of the Wanderer. Twelve sturdy Northumbrians went on behind and helped us up. The road ascends higher and higher after we pass Alnwick, until at last we find ourselves on the brow of a lofty hill. There is an eminence to the right covered with young firs; near it is a square tower of great strength, but only a ruin. The traveller who does not see the country from this knoll misses one of the grandest sights in England. From the lone Cheviot mountains on the left to the sea itself on the far-off right round and round it is all beautiful.I had stayed long enough in Alnwick to see the town and “sights;” the latter is a hateful word, but I have no better ready.I was greatly impressed by the massive grandeur of the noble old castle, the ancient home of the Percys. The figures of armed men on the ramparts, some holding immense stones above the head, as if about to hurl them on an assailant, others in mail jackets with hatchet and pike, are very telling. I could not help thinking as I passed through the gloomy gateways and barbican of the many prisoners whose feet had brushed these very stones in “the brave days of old.”

“March! march! Ettrick and Teviotdale,Why, my lads, dinna ye march forward in order?March! march! Eskdale and Liddesdale,All the blue bonnets are over the border.Many a banner spread flutters above your head;Many a crest that is famous in story;Mount and make ready then,Sons of the mountain glen:Fight for your Queen, and the old Scottish glory!”

“March! march! Ettrick and Teviotdale,Why, my lads, dinna ye march forward in order?March! march! Eskdale and Liddesdale,All the blue bonnets are over the border.Many a banner spread flutters above your head;Many a crest that is famous in story;Mount and make ready then,Sons of the mountain glen:Fight for your Queen, and the old Scottish glory!”

July 11th.

A six-miles’ drive, through some of the most charming scenery in England, brought us into Durham. The city looks very imposing from the hilltop; its noble old castle, and grand yet solemn looking cathedral. Eight hundred years of age! What a terrible story they could tell could those grey old piles but speak! It would be a very sad one to listen to. Perhaps they do talk to each other at the midnight hour, when the city is hushed and still.

It would take one a week, or even a fortnight, to see all the sights about Durham; he would hardly in that time, methinks, be tired of the walks around the town and by the banks of the winding Weir.

It is a rolling country, a hilly land around here. The people, by the way, call those hills banks. We had a hard day. John’s gloves were torn with the reins, for driving was no joke. I fear, however, the horses hardly enjoyed the scenery.

The streets in Durham are badly paved and dangerously steep. We did not dare to bring the Wanderer through, therefore, but made a sylvandétourand got on the north road again beyond.

If we reckoned upon encamping last night in a cosy meadow once more we were mistaken, we were glad to get standing room close to the road and behind a little public-house.

Miners going home from their work in the evening passed us in scores. I cannot say they look picturesque, but they are blithe and active, and would make capital soldiers. Their legs were bare from their knees downwards, their hats were skull-caps, and all visible flesh was as black almost as a nigger’s.

Many of these miners, washed and dressed, returned to this public-house, drank and gambled till eleven, then went outside and fought cruelly.

The long rows of grey-slab houses one passes on leaving Durham by road do not look inviting. For miles we passed through a mining district, a kind of black country—a country, however, that would be pleasant enough, with its rolling hills, its fine trees and wild hedgerows, were it not for the dirt and squalor and poverty one sees signs of everywhere on the road. Every one and everything looks grey and grimy, and many of the children, but especially the women, have a woebegone, grief-stricken look that tells its own tale.

I greatly fear that intemperance is rampant enough in some of these villages, and the weaker members of the family have to suffer for it.

Here is an old wrinkled yellow woman sitting on a doorstep. She is smoking a short black clay, perhaps her only comfort in life. A rough-looking man, with a beard of one week’s growth, appears behind and rudely stirs her with his foot. She totters up and nearly falls as he brushes past unheeding.

Yonder are two tiny girls, also sitting on a doorstep—one about seven, the other little more than a baby. An inebriated man—can it be the father?—comes along the street and stops in front of them. He wants to get in.

“Git oot o’ t’way!” he shouts to the oldest.

His leg is half lifted as if to kick.

“And thou too,”—this to the baby.

One can easily imagine what sort of a home those poor children have. It cannot be a very happy one.

More pleasant to notice now a window brilliant with flowers, and a clean and tidy woman rubbing the panes.

On and on through beautiful scenery, with peeps at many a noble mansion in the distance. Only the landscape is disfigured by unsightly mine machinery, and the trees are all a-blur with the smoky haze that lies around them.

The country around the village of Birtley is also very pretty. A mile beyond from the hilltop the view is grand, and well worth all this tiring day’s drag to look upon.

Everywhere on the roadside are groups of miners out of work, lying on the grass asleep or talking.

The dust is trying to the nerves to-day; such a black dust it is, too.

We stop at Birtley. I trust I shall never stop there again.

“No, there is no stabling here;” thus spoke a slattern whom I addressed.

“Water t’ hosses. Dost think I’d give thee water? Go and look for t’ well.”

Some drunken miners crowded round.

“For two pins,” one said, “I’d kick the horses. Smartly I would.”

He thought better of it, however.

We pushed on in hopes of getting stabling and perhaps a little civility.

We pushed on right through Gateshead and Newcastle, and three miles farther to the pleasant village of Gosforth, before we found either.

Gosforth is a village of villas, and here we have found all the comfort a gipsy’s heart could desire.

We are encamped on a breezy common in sight of the Cheviot Hills, and here we will lie till Tuesday morning for the sake of our horses if not ourselves.

I shall never forget the kindly welcome I received here from the Spanish Consul.

July 14th.—Down tumbled the mercury yesterday morning, and down came the rain in torrents, the rattling, rushing noise it made on the roof of the Wanderer being every now and then drowned in the pealing of the thunder. But this morning the air is delightfully cool, the sky is bright, the atmosphere clear, and a gentle breeze is blowing.

Left Gosforth early. The country at first was somewhat flat, sparsely treed, well cultivated and clean.

The first village we passed through is called, I think, Three Mile Bridge. It is quite a mining place, far from wholesome, but the children looked healthy, a fact which is due, doubtless, to the bracing, pure air they breathe. All are bare-legged and shoeless, from the lad or lass of fifteen down to the month-old kicking baby.

Came to a splendid park and lodge-gates, the latter surmounted by two bulls couchant; I do not care to know to whom the domain belongs.

I find it is best not to be told who lives in the beautiful mansions I am passing every day in my journey due north. I can people them all in imagination. A name might banish every morsel of romance from the finest castle that peeps through the greenery of trees in some glen, or stands boldly out in the sunshine of some steep hill or braeland.

By eleven o’clock we had done ten miles and entered Morpeth.

Now, O ye health-seekers or intending honeymoon enjoyers! why not go for a month to Morpeth? It lies on the banks of the winding Wansbeck, it is but four miles from the ocean; it is quaint, quiet, curious, hills everywhere, wood and water everywhere; it has the remains of a grand old castle on the hill top, and a gaol that looks like one. Accommodation? did you say. What a sublunary thought, but Morpeth has capital lodging-houses and good inns, so there!

We caught our first glimpse of the sea to-day away on our right.

We had hoped to stay at Felton, a romantic little village on the river. Partly in a deep dell it lies, partly on a hill; rocks and wooded knolls with shady walks by the streamlet-side make it well suited for a summer resort, but it is hardly known. Not to Londoners, certainly.

Stabling we could have here, but so hilly is the place that a flat meadow was looked for in vain. After spending a whole hour searching for accommodation I returned to the glen where I had left the Wanderer, and our poor tired horses had to go on again.

Hills, hills, hills, that seemed as if they never would end; hills that take the heart, and life, and spirit out of the horses and make my heart bleed for them. The beauty of the scenery cannot comfort me now, nor the glory of the wild flowers, nor the blue sea itself. We but lag along, hoping, praying, that a hostelry of some sort may soon heave in sight.

I am riding on in front, having often to dismount and push my cycle before me.

All at once on a hilltop, with a beautiful green valley stretching away and away towards the sea, I come upon the cosiest wee Northumbrian inn ever I wish to see. I signal back the joyful tidings to the weary Wanderer.

Yee, there is stabling, and hay, and straw, and everything that can be desired.

“Hurrah! Come on, Bob, I feel as happy now as a gipsy king.”

July 15th.—The drag began this morning in earnest. We were among the banks of Northumbria. (Bank—a stiff hill.) With a light carriage they are bad enough, but with a two-ton waggon, small in wheel and long ’twixt draughts, the labour, not to say danger, reaches a maximum. The country here is what a cockney would term a mountainous one, and in some parts of it even a Scotchman would feel inclined to agree with him. At one time we would be down at the bottom of some gloomy defile, where the road crossed over a Gothic bridge, and a wimpling stream went laughing over its rocky bed till lost to sight among overhanging trees.

Down in that defile we would eye with anxious hearts the terrible climb before us.

“Can we do it?” That is the question.

“We must try.” That is the answer.

The roller is fastened carefully behind a back wheel, and “Hip!” away we go, the horses tearing, tottering, scraping, almost falling.

And now we are up, and pause to look thankfully, fearfully back while the horses stand panting, the sweat running in streamlets over their hoofs.

The short banks are more easily rushed. It is a long steep hill that puts us in danger.

There is hardly probably a worse hill or a more dangerous hollow than that just past the castle gate of Alnwick.

It needed a stout heart to try the descent. Easy indeed that descent would have been had a horse fallen, for neither the brake, which I now had sole charge of, nor the skid, could have prevented the great van from launching downwards.

But the ascent was still more fraught with danger. It was like climbing a roof top. Could the horses do it this time?

Impossible. They stagger half way up, they stagger and claw the awful hill, andstop.

No, not stop, for see, the caravan has taken charge and is moving backwards, dragging the horses down.

The roller and a huge stone beneath the wheels prevented an ugly accident and the complete wreck of the Wanderer. Twelve sturdy Northumbrians went on behind and helped us up. The road ascends higher and higher after we pass Alnwick, until at last we find ourselves on the brow of a lofty hill. There is an eminence to the right covered with young firs; near it is a square tower of great strength, but only a ruin. The traveller who does not see the country from this knoll misses one of the grandest sights in England. From the lone Cheviot mountains on the left to the sea itself on the far-off right round and round it is all beautiful.

I had stayed long enough in Alnwick to see the town and “sights;” the latter is a hateful word, but I have no better ready.

I was greatly impressed by the massive grandeur of the noble old castle, the ancient home of the Percys. The figures of armed men on the ramparts, some holding immense stones above the head, as if about to hurl them on an assailant, others in mail jackets with hatchet and pike, are very telling. I could not help thinking as I passed through the gloomy gateways and barbican of the many prisoners whose feet had brushed these very stones in “the brave days of old.”

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