CORRESPONDENCE.

A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.—I[I.

(TO THE EDITOR Or Tea " SPROTATOR.1 SIR,—There is no county in England where the people stand higher in their own esteem than in Yorkshire, and though their self- complacency is exaggerated, and is the mark of a certain posi- tiveness in their nature which always goes with hard limits, they are unquestionably a people of grit and great aplomb. But soft- ness of speech is not their foible. A friend asked a farmer in the neighbourhood, who had been married just a fortnight to a hand- some, care-worn young woman of thirty, if he did not find himself very happy in his new condition ; on which he replied,—in his wife's presence, I believe,—" he was main comfortable before he married, and did not know he was much more so now." When a party from one of the Duke of Devonshire's gamekeeper's entered a little moorland farm to look after some rabbits, the farmer's wife with her arms akimbo, and regarding them apparently with a purely speculative interest, remarked, without any sign of irrita- tion, "You seem but a foul lot," and when asked Why, mistress? what is there foul about us ?' she looked steadily at the group, vouchsafed no answer, and re-entered her cottage. Yet there is one side on which there is no hardness or want of apprehensive- ness in the Yorkshire people ; they seem greatly impressed by their own scenery. It is almost the only county in which I find the natives' opinion as to what it is worth while to see, a safe one. If you ask their advice, they do not send you (like 80 many other country

people) to newly-built houses, with grand, formal gardens, but to wild moors and lonely mountain roads. No doubt we did meet with one farmer, a man very proud of his own lofty-Tattered "house-place," who expressed his surprise at the fancy of his guests for visiting a certain inn at the foot of one of the finest moorland scenes in Yorkshire, remarking calmly," I see none so much in't,— I can touch 't kitchen-ceiling with my fingers ;" but in the general way, I found no advice better than that of the farmers themselves as to the relative interest of the walks and drives. And, probably, it is another proof of their sensitiveness to the influences of scenery, that the sometimes gloomy insularity of the English character is seen in its wildest form in Yorkshire. We were more than once reminded by men's faces and manners of that most powerful and eerie, most imaginative and most gloomy of all English stories, in which the despair of proud and selfish passion, and of dumb, wild yearning after the past, are expressed with a fierce and terrifying force,—"Wuthering Heights," by Emily Brontë. In one of our little journeys, on the top of a high and lonely moor, we found ourselves uncertain of our way just as we reached a farm, that might have been Wuthering Heights itself, so far was it from all human habitation. My wife knocked to ask the way at the house, while I remained in the trap. It was long before anyone answered her. At last, a lame man, with a strange desolate face, came limping out of an outhouse, and gave her brief, terse directions. After he had retired, she found that one of the dogs collars was broken and had dropped, and she wanted the man's help to find it. After much knocking, he reappeared on the scene, discovering, as he opened the door, a wild con- fusion in the house, the stairs all littered with clothes, as though there had been a violent struggle, but no one except himself apparently within ; when told what my wife wanted, he said, almost ferociously, "I've seen flout on't," and re-entered the house, slamming and immediately locking the door after him, with a most repellent decisiveness of inhospitality that was almost worthy of the savage hero of " Wuthering Heights," Heathcliff, himself. Certainly the wilder Yorkshire solitudes are apt to nourish a melancholy sort of savagery which dreads the remedy—human society—even more than it dreads the brooding and imaginative state of nerve which constitutes the disease. Mr. Wordsworth had a great admiration for the influence of solitude

"No mate, no comrade Lucy knew She dwelt on a wild moor ;

The sweetest thingthat ever grew Beside a human door."

But I think Emily Bronte's description of the effect of dwelling "on a wild moor," "without mate or comrade," is truer to the actual experience of Yorkshire life. In many different moorland districts we were struck, both in women and in men, with the dreary, sombre, and wistful expression of faces that seemed to have watched tire purple thunderclouds float over the deeper purple of the moorlands, till they were quite unfitted for entering into the quick and rapid ripples of human interests, and had caught some- thing of the monotonous tint of the rain and mist of the great moorland sea. Miss Bronte herself must have felt this. She speaks of the moors as not unfrequently "livid," and there is a shiver of dread in her description of her sister Emily's passion for them. Perhaps they are better as occasional friends than as constant companions and intimates.

We have had a delightful journey with our much-experienced horse from the Western moorland tract of Yorkshire to the Eastern, for which purpose we had to cross the great inter- vening plain which is the land of corn and fruit and succulent roots. Some friends whom we wished to see were staying in the neighbourhood of Helmealey, in scenery at once the most various and rich in Yorkshire ; but instead of driving direct thither, we determined to direct our way by Kettlewell, over the range of hills which divides Wharfedale from the valley of the Ure and Swale, to Middleham, and thence to cross the great plain to Thirsk. A little beyond Thirsk, the, ascent of the liambledon Hills begins, and after passing them you descend into the lovely valley of the Rye, and upon the fair ruin of Rievaulx. The journey is not only full of charming scenery, first wild, then rich, then tame, and finally romantic, but it is fascinating from the curious vividness with which it impresses on the eye what the geologists assert, that in crossing the plain you are driving over what was the bottom of the sea, at a time when the Western Highlands of Yorkshire rose out of it in steep and still towering cliffs at one aide, and the Eastern Highlands in similar cliffs on the other. For a time, after we had cut off our communications with the Barden valley, we drove westwards and then north to Kilnsey Crag and Kettle- well. Kilnsey Crag is a long, insulated inland limestone cliff, ex-

tending for about half a mile, and standing up as sheer out of the great plain as do the cliffs of Doverfrom the sea. After two days more driving, for the greater part of which we had been tending east- wards, we came to just such another cliff, facing it, at a distance of perhaps forty miles under the Hambledon Hills, called Whitestone ; and between Kilnsey and Whitestone there must some time have washed a sea like that between Dover and Boulogne, though the strait must have been wider, Kilnsey marking the shores on the -west side of the great sea loch, and Whitestone that on the east. From ICilnsey, following the Wharfe upwards to Kettlewell, we became entangled in the mountain regions which must have stood above the waters even when Middleham, and Bedale, and Masham, and Ripon were still oyster-beds or banks of sea-weed. Kettlewell, where we slept the first night, was one of the most characteristic of the Yorkshire hamlets, and reminded us strongly of a descriptive verse in "Peter Bell, the Potter" :—

" And he bad trudged through Yorkshire dales,

Amongst the rocks and winding sears, Whore deep and low the hamlets lie, Beneath their little patch of sky And little lot of stars."

Amongst the cosiest of such hamlets is Kettlewell, lying at the foot of Great Whernside and Buckden Pike, which loom big above you, while the infant Wharfe rushes below the vil- lage. A dear, open stream runs down the chief street, while steep roads climb ambitiously out of it towards the great hills beyond. The name seemed to promise comfort rather than beauty, and a mighty joint of excellent beef,—beef such as we bad not tasted for weeks,—gigantic pasties, rich cream, and piles of oat-cake, fulfilled the promise of the name. But, alas ! even in Xettlewell there was an alloy. There were sheep there feeding on coarse rich herbage beside the village stream, and feeding evidently too eagerly for their peace of stomach. All night long two of them bleated their tales of indigestion into our ears, and overpowered the murmur of the brook with the vain detail of their uneasy symptoms. Soon after leaving Kettlewell, we left behind us the valley of the Wharfe and went up into the mists lying on the wild hills of Zishopdale, from which a torrent tumbles down sloping crags. I remember lunching in a quaint village called West Burton, built round a green, where, set up on a cross, is a cock, adorned with all manner of ribbons, which the village boys yearly renew ; but whether it is St. Peter's cock, and dressed out for its services in re- minding him of his broken faith, or what the ribbons symbolise, I could not find out. Many of the strange little houses have their stables on the ground-floor, and a flight of stone steps leading up to the rooms where the villagers live on the first-floor. West Burton is a very quaint siding into which Yorkshire life is shunted so as to hear but little of the big world outside. Then we had a glorious drive to Middleham, over a grand moor, where the road climbed near to the very summit of the ridge, leaving fir-woods be- neath it, and running parallel with a blaze of glowing heather above. Far and wide stretched the blue plain, and we met not a soul on the way but a forlorn shepherd boy, who was in search of missing stheep, and who came just in time to -assure us that we were quite in the right way, though all traces of a beaten road had dis- appeared in a grassy strip of land between two walls. So steep was the way, that my wife, in her sympathy with poor Old Caution's' troubles, frequently pushed behind the carriage, pro- ducing, I think, about as much effect as the compassionate fly who thought he had helped the carter to get his wheels out of the rut. Weary enough we were when we turned off the mountain-side and descended upon inhospitable Middleham, —a large, cheer- ful market-town, with seven considerable inns and no accom- modation. Every inn repulsed us with loss. A com- pany of organ-builders filled one ; shooting parties occupied another ; commercial travellers a third ; horse-trainers a fourth, and so on. At last, utterly weary, and in anxiety as to 'Old Caution's' much-tried powers, we got a private house to receive us, on condition that the horse and carriage were put up at an inn; but even so, though our good old friend got food and :shelter, we got shelter, but little food. A steak, we were assured, -Ina the wildest of dreams ; a chop was possible, but in the existing condition of Middleham was not to be achieved. Tea (diluted), bacon (greasy), and eggs (half-done) were our only resources ; and such was the meal upon which we went to see the ruin of the famous castle dear to Richard M., and where Edward IV. was confined by Warwick. The old gentleman who showed us over it interested us at least as much as the castle. He was eighty years of age, held the position of town crier, and was enthusiastic for the family who built the first part of the castle (the FitzRanulphs, whom he uniformly called " FitzRandalls"), and for the present owner, or rather for one of his sons,—the first yearnings of whose bowels of tenderness towards the old ruin (betrayed now thirty years ago), the old man repeatedly commemorated in the words, "When 't young gentleman first took a fancy to the plaice ;" but for all intervening potentates between the FitzRanulphs and "'t young gentleman" who appointed him to his position of trust, he showed supreme contempt. On the Nevilles, who built the later parts of the castle, he looked down with ineffable scorn. He evidently conceived that the FitzRanulphs were historic ; that "'t young gentleman," himself, and the late Miss Agnes Strickland (who had once visited the castle, and praised him as the best of guides, interpreters, and commentators), were the representatives of modern thought un- winding the scroll of history ; but that the Nevilles and such like personages were neither fish, flesh, nor fowl.

From inhospitable Middleham, where we hardly obtained either fish, flesh, or fowl, we drove across the great plain by Bedale to Thirsk, — a country of yellow sheaves and mighty

waggons,—and then entered on the romantic country beyond Whitestone Cliff and the Hambledon Hills,—a country in which we found richly-wooded glens meeting from every side, ruined abbeys and castles adding their picturesque effects to those of wild downs, yellow stubble, or cornfields, and, forests of fir ; and, framing the wide horizon, a circle of purple moor. One lovely day we spent with a large and delightful party, in the most lucid atmosphere I ever saw, on Helmsley Moor itself,—whence the eye catches the light sea line beyond 1Vhitby and Filey, a line broken here and there by dark purple ridges of still higher moorland. By moonlight we walked over to Rievaulx, and heard the screech- owls screaming their best at us all the way ; and next day turned our horse's head westward again, towards Ripon and Bar- den. The clouds had gathered once more. When we got to the top of the Hambledon Hills, the most thunderous sky I ever saw —though little came of it—scowled down upon us, and the coldest of winds made us appreciate the name given to a village we had just passed, called Cold Kirkby. The road, as Yorkshire roads will, ended in a most impartial common, without any sign of a definite track, and we gave ourselves up as doomed to face a hurri- cane, with not even so much to guide us as a forlorn sheep .track. But the prospect soon changed,—the "ragged rims of thunder brooding low and shadow streaks of rain" gradually faded away; a fair mountain road succeeded to the impartial com- mon, and as we went down the pass towards Lower Kilburn, a glorious stretch of plain, bathed in the rich blue mists which soften without concealing, came out beneath the bright moorland of the mountain-side. It was like Rubens's great landscape in the National Gallery, but set in a richer frame- work of sun and sky. As 'Old Caution' picked his way very carefully down the pass, and left the Hambledon Hills again behind him, we found it difficult to say whether the Eastern or Western Highlands of Yorkshire were the most impressive. The former have the advantage in beauty and variety of form and colour ; the latter in wild and solitary freedom. I had intended to say something also of our drive to Malliam, where the Aire starts out of a limestone cliff, without visible opening, as if from the rock that Moses struck, and where a little amphitheatre of cliffs stands round the spot, like the cirques of the Pyrenees and the fer-&-cheval of Slat. But all things must come to an end, and the beauties of Yorkshire, like other divine works, are "exceeding broad." In spite of canine, and taurine, and equine terrors, it is long since we had a truer rest. Yorkshire has been to us what it was to the truest of its devotees,— "A little and a lone green lane

That opened on a common wide ; A distant, dreamy, dim, blue chain Of mountains circling every side.

A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air ; And, deepening still the dream-like charm, Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere."

That is the abiding picture which one recalls when one recalls those Yorkshire hills and heaths ; and it cannot but be dear to

anyone who can truly sign himself,— A YORKSHIREMAN.