As we ran on, the bright, pretty, sociable-looking suburbs of London gave way to real country--beautiful, cared-for, garden-like, with grand timber, big houses, and grey churches, supported by the obvious parsonage and school; and deep shady lanes, with some little cart trotting quaintly towards the railway bridge over which we rushed, or boys in smock-frocks sitting on a gate, and shouting friendly salutations (as it seemed) to Eleanor and myself. Then came broad, fair pastures of fairy green, and slow winding rivers that we overtook almost before we had seen them, with ghostly grey pollard willows in formal mystical borders, contrasting with such tints of pale yellow and gay greens, which in their turn shone against low distances of soft blue and purple, that the sense of colour which my great-grandfather had roused in me made me almost tremble with a never-to-be-forgotten pleasure. From this flat but most fair country, the grey towers of Peterborough Cathedral stood up in ancient dignity; and then we ran on again. After a while the country became less rich in colour, and grander in form. No longer stretching flatly to low-lying distances of ethereal hue, it was broken into wooded hills, which folded one over the other with ever-increasing boldness of outline. Now and then the line ran through woods of young oak, with male ferns and bracken at their feet, where the wild hyacinths, which lie there like a blue mist in May, must for some weeks past have made way for the present carpet of pink campion. And now the distance was no longer azure. Over the horizon and the lower part of the sky a thin grey veil had come--a veil of smoke. We were approaching the manufacturing districts. Grander and grander grew the country, less and less pure the colouring. The vegetation was rich almost to rankness; the well-wooded distances were heavily grey. Then tall chimneys poured smoke over the landscape and eclipsed the sun; and through strangely shaped furnaces and chimneys of many forms, which here poured fire from their throats like dragons, and there might have been the huge retorts and chemical apparatus of some giant alchemist, we ran into the station of a manufacturing town. I gazed at the high blackened warehouses, chimneys, and furnaces, which loomed out of the stifling smoke and clanging noises, with horror and wonder. "What a dreadful place!" I exclaimed. "Look at those dreadful things with flames coming out; and oh, Eleanor! there's fire coming out of the ground there. And look at that man opening that great oven door! Oh, what a fire! And what's he poking in it for? And do look! all the men are black. And what a frightful noise everything makes!" Eleanor was looking all the time, but with a complacent expression. She only said, "It is a very busy place. I hear trade's good just now, too." And, "You should see the furnaces at night, Margery, lighting up all the hills. It's grand!"