town in Yorkshire, for Richmond might fairly be called a glorified Knaresborough. It stands just within the hill country looking westward over a sea of waving moorland interspersed with the contrasting luxuriance of old abiding places. The town climbs up a long slope crowned in turn by the massive Norman keep of the castle whose precincts cover a broad plateau, while its curtain walls hang over the brink of a rocky precipice, beneath which the Swale urges its clear impetuous streams round a partial circuit of the town. Richmond is the centre of an ancient district, once known and still often referred to as "Richmondshire," a division of Northumbria, later on, with its two hundred manors, termed "The Honour of Richmond." A marked historical peculiarity of this district is that from the Norman Conquest till the time of Henry VII. it was a fief of the Dukes of Brittany, who included the Earldom of Richmond in their titles. On this account Richmond became occasionally a fief of the King of France, not breaking with this curious foreign ownership till the Tudor period, when France and Brittany were united. This overlordship, however, so far as the life of the district was concerned, is a matter of purely academic interest. Many people will no doubt be surprised to learn that the nowadays more conspicuous Richmond on the Thames took its name while a hamlet from the Yorkshire town. While to turn to comparative but familiar trifles the well-known eighteenth-century song, "The Lass of Richmond Hill," does not refer to a suburban maiden but to Frances l'Anson, the daughter of a rich London solicitor who had estates in Yorkshire and for a country residence "Hill House," still standing on high ground above the town. The author was a barrister, one Leonard Mac Nally, who subsequently in 1787 married the subject of his impassioned ode, and the song was first sung at Vauxhall. It is worth noting too, perhaps, that Byron's wife, Miss Milbanke, a yet more famous beauty, came also from the Hill House at Richmond. The town is the centre of a great agricultural and pastoral district. Market-day in its spacious, old-fashioned market-place, on the high slope of the town, is an animated spectacle. Purveyors from the manufacturing districts, which, though left now a long way behind us in actual distance, are comparatively near by rail, throng here to purchase supplies. It is a country of small and moderate-sized farmers, all of whom, however, are of sufficient substance to [Illustration: THE SWALE, RICHMOND, YORKSHIRE] [Illustration]