The ruin is deserted and we find ourselves sole possessors of Whitby Abbey at an hour when the twilight softens the outlines and touches with gray and purple hues the old town at our feet and the rough moorland hills in the background, while the wide expanse of ocean glows mysteriously from the reflection of the dim-lit skies. The ruin rises abruptly from the soft greensward upon which the cows are contentedly grazing, and near at hand, gleaming darkly in the fading light, lies the fish pool, which lends much to the picturesqueness of the surroundings. The great church has fallen into complete ruin; decay is riot everywhere. Only half a century ago the central tower crashed to the earth, carrying many arches and pillars with it, and huge fragments of masonry still lie scattered about as if fallen from some thunder-riven cliff. Whitby Abbey is rich in legend, and at such an hour we will trouble ourselves little about sober fact--let mystery wrap the ruin even as the mantle of gathering darkness; for us it shall be only the "High Whitby's cloistered pile" of romance. We pass outside the abbey confines and pause before St. Mary's Church, a long squat building with low tower, as bald and plain as the abbey is pretentious and ornate. It was built as a rival to the abbey church in a very early day when there were bickerings between the townspeople and the monks of Whitby. In the churchyard, thick with mouldering memorials, has lately been raised a Saxon cross, inscribed to the memory of Caedmon, Father of English Letters, who "fell asleep hard by A. D. 680." [Illustration: WHITBY ABBEY AND CROSS.] As we return to our hotel, we are attracted into one of the old-town shops by a display of old brass and silver, and the genial proprietor at once establishes a basis of community, for has he not been in the States and has he not a brother there now? We pick up an antique lantern with dingy horn doors and green with verdigris and try the stale joke, "Made in Birmingham," which once or twice has brought a storm of indignant protest on our heads. But it does not so excite our Yorkshire friend. "Yes," he said, "I had a dozen copies made of a very rare piece that came into my hands. And that accounts for the price--genuine antiques are so rare and so sought for that the original would cost you many times the copy--and after all, you would be no better off when you had it." We cannot resist such confidence and add further to our burden of oddities such as one gathers, willy nilly, in a tour of the nooks and corns. Whitby shops are full of jet ornaments--brooches, beads, bracelets, and a thousand and one fanciful things--for jet is mined near the town,--a smooth lustrous substance whose name has come to signify the final degree of blackness.