With these memories to beguile the way we come to Ferryhill, a mining village crowning a ridge looking over Spennymoor and the valley of the Wear. To Ferryhill came in 1634 three soldiers—a captain, a lieutenant, and an ensign—from Norwich on a tour and in search of adventure. These were early days for tours; days, too, when adventures were not far to seek. However, risky though their trip may have been, they returned in safety, as may be judged from the lieutenant having afterwards published an account of their wanderings through twenty-six English counties. Clad in Lincoln green, like young foresters, they sped the miles with jest and observations on the country they passed through. Of Ferryhill they remark that “such as know it knows it overtops and commands a great part of the country.” On this Pisgah, then, they unpacked their travelling plate and “borrowed a cup of refreshing health from a sweet and most pleasant spring”; by which it seems that there were teetotallers in those days also. Those were the days before coal-mines and blast-furnaces cut up the country, and before Spennymoor, away on the left, was converted from a moorland into a township; a sufficiently startling change. [Picture: Ferryhill: The Abandoned Road-Works] Seen from down the road looking southwards, Ferryhill forms an impressive coronet to the long ridge of hill on which it stands; its rough, stone-built cottages—merely commonplace to a nearer view—taking an unwarranted importance from the bold serrated outlines they present against the sky, and looking like the bastioned outworks of some Giant Blunderbore’s ogreish stronghold. The traveller from the south, passing through Ferryhill and looking backwards from the depths of the valley road, is cheated of a part of this romantic impression; he has explored the arid and commonplace village and has lost all possibility of illusion. Let us, therefore, envy the pilgrims from the north. It is, indeed, a highly interesting view, looking back upon Ferryhill, and one touched with romance of both the gentle and the terrifying sort. In the first place, to that tall embankment seen in the accompanying drawing of the scene belongs a story. You perceive that earthwork to be unfinished. It sets out from the cutting seen in the distant hillside, and, crossing the road which comes in a breakneck curve downhill, pursues a straight and level course for the corresponding rise on the hither side, stopping, incomplete, somewhat short of it. “An abandoned railway,” thinks the stranger, and so it looks to be; but it is, in fact, a derelict enterprise embarked upon at the close of the coaching era by a local Highway Board for the purpose of giving a flat and straight road across the valley. It begins with a long cutting on the southern side of the hill on which the village stands, and, going behind the back of the houses, emerges as seen in the picture. The tolls authorised would have