Though London is the greatest industrial city of the world, it does not succeed in being sordid-looking or mean. But the Midlands--where are the new great manufacturing cities--are frankly horrible, grimy city following grimy city, the pavements seeming never to end, the suburbs of one town stretching out lank arms to greet those of another. When rain sets in, the sordidness of these towns is complete. Thickly growing chimneys take the place of trees, and from the tops of their great harsh trunks float thin wisps of black foliage. The streets are of a miserable muddiness which bemires without softening the hardness of the pavements. Through the smoky, dirty, wet air pallid faces loom. The very meat in the shops has no red wholesomeness, but looks pallid and anæmic; that, I suppose, is really due to the fact that the Midlands so largely eat pork, but it pleases me to imagine that the inanimate stuff also feels the depression of this smoke-palled district and knows not the red of life. But much of the evil is curable. Sheffield is a brighter, more sunny town than most in the Midlands because its authorities insist on something being done to mitigate the smoke nuisance. In most of the other towns factory and workshop can pour out unchecked their defiling streams, poisoning the air and darkening the sky so that the birds leave the district in despair, and no green thing flourishes and men grow pale and unwholesome. Now that is being changed, and the Midland cities are beginning to claim their share of the heritage of English beauty. Away from the actual new manufacturing towns there are none without some beauty. Durham in the north perches grandly on its river, and the river-front shows off well the impressive Cathedral. York, with its famous Minster, has been already noted in another chapter. To Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare, all visitors to England go, but some English people are beginning to resent the commercial spirit which makes it purely a "show" town, with fees payable for this and that at every turn. A town not too "hackneyed" but full of historical interest is St. Albans, the Verulam of the Romans, with its fine Abbey Church overlooking hill and field. The path past that church was a wide-paved Roman road once, and by the vicarage foundations of Roman chambers and mosaics are found. Some two thousand years ago St. Albans was a stronghold of the Britons, protected naturally on two sides by marsh and river; adding to those natural defences an artificial ditch, earthworks, and a palisade. It had to stand an onslaught of the Roman invaders, and, of course, fell. Before that Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, had laid the town waste--Boadicea of whom Cowper sang:-- When the British warrior Queen, Bleeding from the Roman rods, Sought, with an indignant mien, Counsel of her country's gods.