I found it very little cooler in Yorkshire than in London; but there were noble trees and welcome shade in the beautiful park of Langdon, near Northallerton, where I spent some July days, in an atmosphere a thought too equine for my taste; however, my kind hosts (the Fifes) were as fond of their flowers as of their horses, and were busy adding wildernesses and rockeries and other informal beauty-spots to the formal gardens of their new home, which they had recently bought from Lord Teignmouth. I was driven over one day to see the Hospital of St. John of God at Scorton, where a hundred inmates, all crippled or disabled, were tended with admirable care and devotion by a religious brotherhood. A local clergyman, I remember, dined with us that evening at Langdon--a man whose mission, or hobby, seemed to be to collect and retail such odd and out-of-the-way facts as one finds in the {117} statistical column of _Tit-Bits_. In the course of the evening he informed us (1) that a pound of thread spun by a silkworm will make a thread 600 miles long; (2) that there are in the skin of the average man 2,304,000 pores; and (3) that about 30,000 snails are eaten every day in the city of Paris. What one feels about such facts, dumped down on one promiscuously, is that they do not lead anywhere, or afford any kind of opening for rational conversation. I had rather hoped to escape the burden of my Oxford Local Examination work this summer; but as it was apparently difficult to replace me, I went up to Dumfries for my usual week in July. Our Convent-school being the only centre in the district for these examinations, there were, as usual, several candidates from outside. Among them were two pairs of Protestant sisters (Wedderburn-Maxwells and Goldie-Scotts), whose mamma and governess respectively sat all day in the corridor outside the big schoolroom, keeping watch and ward, it was understood, against the danger of their children being "got at" between the papers by the nuns--or possibly the Benedictine examiner!--and influenced in the direction of Popery. Our children were much amused by the way in which these little girls were whisked away, during the intervals, from any possible contact with their "Roman" fellow-candidates; but the little girls themselves looked somewhat disconsolate, having perhaps had pleasant anticipations of games, between examination-hours, in the well-equipped playground of the school.