of golden grain. Great flights of startled doves people the air,--as white as snow under the sable fleeces of the driving storm. I had seen York under different guises, but never before under a sky at once so sombre and so romantic. We bear toward Thirsk now, leaving behind us, westward of our track, old Ripon, in the distance, memorable for many associations,--especially the contiguity of that loveliest of ecclesiastical ruins, Fountains Abbey,--and cherished in theatrical annals as the place of the death and burial of the distinguished founder of the Jefferson family of actors.[48] Bleak Haworth is not far distant, and remembrance of it prompts many sympathetic thoughts of the strange genius of Charlotte Brontë. Darlington is the next important place, a town of manufacture, conspicuous for its tall, smoking chimneys and evidently prosperous. This is the land of stone walls and stone cottages,--the grim precinct of Durham. The country is cultivated, but rougher than the Midlands, and the essentially diversified character of this small island is once again impressed upon your mind. All through this region there are little white-walled houses with red roofs. At Ferry Hill the scenery changes again and becomes American,--a mass of rocky gorges and densely wooded ravines. All trace of storm has vanished by this time, and when, after a brief interval of eager expectation, the noble towers of Durham cathedral sweep into the prospect, that superb monument of ancient devotion, together with all the dark gray shapes of that pictorial city,--so magnificently placed, in an abrupt precipitous gorge, on both sides of the brimming Weir,--are seen under a sky of the softest Italian blue, dappled with white clouds of drifting fleece. Durham is all too quickly passed,--fading away in a landscape sweetly mellowed by a faint blue mist. Then stately rural mansions appear, half hidden among great trees. Wreaths of smoke curl upward from scattered dwellings all around the circle of the hills. Each distant summit is seen to be crowned with a tower or a town. A fine castle springs into view just before Birtley glances by, and we see that this is a place of woodlands, piquant with a little of the roughness of unsophisticated nature. But the scene changes suddenly, as in a theatre, and almost in a moment the broad and teeming Tyne blazes beneath the scorching summer sun, and the gray houses of Gateshead and Newcastle fill the picture with life and motion. The waves glance and sparkle,--a wide plain of shimmering silver. The stream is alive with shipping. There is movement everywhere, and smoke and industry and traffic,--and doubtless noise, though we are on a height and cannot hear it. A busier scene could not be found in all this land, nor one more strikingly representative of the industrial character and interests of England. [Illustration: _Berwick Castle._]