"Britain," says William of Malmesbury, "contains in its remotest parts a place on the borders of Scotland where Bede was born and educated. The whole country was formerly studded with monasteries, and with beautiful cities, founded therein by the Romans; but now, owing to the devastations of the Danes and Normans, it has nothing to allure the senses. Through it runs the Wear, a river of no mean width and tolerable rapidity. It flows into the sea, and receives ships, which are driven thither by the wind, into its tranquil bosom." With the mending of a few phrases, almost the whole of this description by the twelfth-century chronicler could be transferred to the Wear, and to the Durham and Sunderland, of our own day. The Scots have earned the right to be classed with the Danes and Normans as the pillagers of the fanes and castles of this centre of the ecclesiastical and political power of ancient Northumbria. Their modern successors, as destroyers of objects that "allure the senses," are the mine-owner and the mill-owner, the railway and the blast-furnace, the chemical works and the dockyard. The march of modern industry has taken the place of the foray of the Borderers in the valley of the Wear, as on the neighbour streams of the Tyne and Tees; and, like the fires of Tophet, the smoke of its burning goes up day and night. Yet there are compensations. The Wear does not quarrel with the good fortune that has clouded its once pure air, muddied its whilom clear stream, and disturbed its "tranquil bosom" with keels that no longer depend upon the wind for their coming and going. The wealth that has come to it with peace and the development of its mineral resources and shipping trade is not despised, although it be soiled with honest coal-dust.