BY Beast Market Hill, past the castle and over the bridge, one leaves Newark for the north. Level crossings of the railways now and again bedevil the way, which is flat so far as the eye can reach—and much farther, and the meadows on either side are intersected by runlets and marshes, the road carried over them by a succession of red-brick bridges. At a distance of one and a half miles, the true Trent is crossed by a wooden bridge, and South Muskham reached, where the level-crossing gates take the place of the old turnpike. The act of looking backwards at this point is a more pleasing physical exercise than the mental retrospect is ever likely to be, anywhere. Sir Walter Scott perceived the beauty of the view, for he introduces it in Jeanie Deans’ journey south, and says, in a fine passage: “The hundred-armed Trent and the blackened ruins of Newark castle, demolished in the great Civil War, lay before her.” “Hundred-armed” is a good and eloquent figure, although on a prosaic calculation likely to be found an exaggeration. Milton, indeed, writing a hundred and ninety years or so before, gives the Trent but thirty arms, on which, it must be allowed, Sir Walter’s computation is a great advance. But here is Milton’s version:— “Trent, which like some earth-born giant spreads His thirty arms along the indented meads.” Even Drayton, in his _Polyolbion_, does not more nearly approach to Sir Walter’s computation, in the couplet:— “The bounteous Trent, that in herself enseams, Both thirty sorts of fish and thirty sundry streams.” Shakespeare rather shirks the calculation, and contents himself with describing it as the “smug and silver Trent.” As for mere travellers, who did not happen to be poets or to be engaged in the exploitation of scenery, they regarded this stream merely with apprehension, and they did right so to look upon it, for Trent often overflowed its thirty or hundred arms, as the case might be, and converted the flats for miles around into the semblage of a vast lake. Then, indeed—if at no other time—Newark was “upon” Trent, if not actually “in” it, and all the many other towns and villages, which bear a similarly composite title, were in like case. Doubtless it was on one of these occasions in 1739, before the river was bridged here, that the Newcastle wagon was lost at the ford, when the driver and the horses all perished. Nearly thirty years later, on the 6th of June 1767, the poet Gray, writing from London, before starting on a journey in these parts, says:—“Pray that the Trent may not intercept us at Newark, for we have had infinite rain here.” Nor are floods infrequent, even now, and many a boating-party has voyaged down the Great North Road between Newark and Carlton-upon-Trent.