and, the ground opening, he and his carts and horses were instantly swallowed up. The tale goes on to say that, given a fine day and clear water, the impious farmer and his carts and horses may yet be seen floating deep down in these supposedly fathomless pools! De Foe, however, travelling this way in 1724, is properly impatient of these tales. “’Tis evident,” says he, “they are nothing but old coal-pits, filled with water by the river Tees.” XVIII DARLINGTON, to which we now come, is a very busy, very prosperous, very much rebuilt town, nursing a sub-Metropolitan swagger of architectural pretension in its chief streets infinitely unlike anything expected by the untravelled in these latitudes. There is a distinctly Holloway Road—plus Whitechapel Road—and Kennington Lane air about Darlington which does but add to the piquancy of those streets. Tumbledown houses of no great age and no conceivable interest are shouldered by flaunting shops; or rather, to speak by the card, by “stores” and “emporia”; these alternating with glittering public-houses and restaurants. The effect can be paralleled only by imagining a typical general servant dressed in a skirt and train for a Queen’s Drawing Room, with ploughboy’s boots, a cloth jacket, and ostrich-feathered hat to complete the costume. It is a town only now beginning to realise that prosperity must make some outward show of the fact, and it is accordingly going in for show in whole-hearted fashion, and emerging from the grime in which James the First found it in 1617. “Darneton!” he said when told its name; “I think it’s Darneton th’ Dirt.” Dirty indeed it must have been for James, fresh from his own capital, where they flung their sewage from the windows into the streets, to have found it remarkable. De Foe, fifty years later, said, “Darlington, a post-town, has nothing remarkable in it but dirt, and a high bridge over little or no water.” An odd contemporary commentary upon this seems to lurk in the fact that cloth was then brought to Darlington from all parts—even from Scotland—to be bleached! More akin to those times than these are the names of the streets, which, like those of York, are chiefly “gates”:—High Northgate, Skinnergate, Bondgate, Blackwellgate, and Priestgate.