There are many places of interest in the corner where the Ribble, swelling in volume and altering somewhat in character, leaves Yorkshire for the County Palatine. The farmhouse of Waddington, where Henry VI. after spending several months was eventually captured, is still standing. The ruined abbeys, too, of Shawley and Whalley are both near Clitheroe. So also is the great Roman Catholic College of Stonyhurst. And one uses the epithet advisedly, as on the nucleus of a fine Tudor country-house and a large estate, acquired a century ago, additions have been made to the buildings by the thrifty Jesuit managers at a cost of something like £300,000, a figure that might set even the wealthiest of our public schools agog with envy. Indeed, the banks of the Ribble are as closely associated with the ancient faith both to-day and yesterday as any district in England. One is not likely to forget what hopes were placed by both the first and second Pretender on the gentry of this then remote part of England, nor what befell them at the ancient town of Preston, now so expanded and so busy, on the Ribble's banks. Of the five rivers--for I have omitted mention of the Aire since it is absorbed so early into the industrial districts of Leeds and Bradford--which flow down the north-western dales towards the central plain of Yorkshire and the Humber, the Wharfe is as notable as any. It is also, next to the Aire, the first to cross the route of any one going northward and across the grain of the country. It is surprising how soon all signs of the vast and murky industries of Leeds are shaken off. For where 8 or 9 miles to the north of it the N.E. railroad crosses the Wharfe and stays near it for a time, the prospect is one of a broad and strenuous river sweeping through a noble vale. Spacious and undefiled woods and homesteads and country houses adorn the slopes, and great Yorkshire fields of meadow or pasture spread back from the banks apparently unconscious of the very existence of the prodigious stir and uproar which beneath vast canopies of murk and smoke is going forward less than a dozen miles away. Far away the most celebrated spot upon the Wharfe, and one of the most visited of the kind perhaps in all England, is Bolton Abbey. To those who have never seen it the very fact, perhaps, of its propinquity to the industrial districts, and the familiarity of its name, might suggest a scene if not actually overrated at any rate so overrun as to impair its charms. The first is certainly not the case; and as regards the second, though thousands [Illustration: THE WHARFE, THE STRID, YORKSHIRE] [Illustration]