of the precipice, where it makes one giddy to imagine how they have been planted, for they ore not of spontaneous growth, but were all planted by the late Mr Knott. [Sidenote: REMARKABLE IN YEWDALE.] You cross the pellucid Beck of Yewdale by a ricketty wooden bridge, pass through the farm-yard of Low Yewdale, and immediately after gain the high road, which runs along the west side of the valley close under the crags. As you near the head of the vale, be pleased to observe, as you will doubtless be pleased in observing, the sweetly situated farm of High Yewdale, with its long rows of unmercifully clipt yews, looking like magnified chessmen, one of which was recently recommended to my notice by an observant fair friend, as presenting a ludicrous resemblance to a starched puritan of the time of the Commonwealth, attired in round beaver and “cloak of formal cut.” You must here diverge a little from your line of ramble to examine the aged tree which gives its name to the vale, and which some unscrupulous local chronologists stoutly maintain to have been coeval with the deluge. Without feeling myself called upon to establish that fact, I may safely enough assert that it must be of vast antiquity, and it is the largest yew that I have yet fallen in with, those immortalized by Wordsworth as “the pride of Lorton vale,” and the “fraternal four of Borrowdale,” not excepted. I, and two friends, girthed it one summer with three riding-whips knotted together, and found it, at five feet from the ground, to measure 29 feet in circumference. You see that it has an aperture in the northern side of its huge trunk, which, like Mercutio's wound, though “not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, 'twill serve” to let you go in and creep round between that centre pillar formed of the most internal layers of its wood and the surrounding wall formed of its external layers and bark, a large portion of the intermediate timber having, like the halls of Lord Byron’s fathers, “gone to decay.” [Sidenote: FUTILE FOX-CRAFT.]