At Biddick the great Victoria Railway Bridge crosses the Wear by a series of large spans at a height of 156 feet above the stream. The "Biddickers," now good, bad, and indifferent, like other "keelmen" of their class, were a wild set last century, and among them the Jacobite Earl of Perth found refuge after Culloden. The banks of the stream, crowded with busy and grimy colliery rows and coal staithes, the lines of rail and tramway that run up and athwart the inclines, and the fleets of coal-barges ascending and descending, help to announce the close neighbourhood of Sunderland. Before we reach the seaport of the Wear, however, Hylton Ferry is passed. In spite of the increasing sounds and sights of shipping industry and manufacture, a little bit of superstition and romance continues to linger about dilapidated Hylton Castle, for a fabulous number of centuries the home of the fighting race of Hyltons, now extinct as county landlords: the countryside has not quite forgotten the family goblin or brownie--the "Cauld Lad"--the eccentric ghost of a stable-boy who was killed in a fit of anger by a former lord of Hylton; though it remembers and points out with more pride Ford Hall, where the Havelocks, a martial race of later date and purer fame, were born and bred. It is not easy in these days to associate the three townships comprehended within the municipal and parliamentary bounds of Sunderland with cloistral seclusion or warlike events, or with romance or mystery in any form--more especially when the place is approached by road, rail, or river from the colliery districts that hem it in on the land side. Yet busy, smoky, and in some spots ugly and squalid as it is, Sunderland hardly deserves the censure that has been heaped upon it as a town where "earth and water are alike black and filthy," through whose murky atmosphere the blue sky seldom shows itself, and whose architectural features are utterly contemptible. Sunderland has a number of fine buildings and handsome thoroughfares, and a large part of the town is lifted clear of the dingy streets by the wharves and river-bank. The animation on water and shore, the passing stream of coasting and river craft, and the other signs of shipping, shipbuilding, and manufacturing trade, spanned by the huge arch of the Cast Iron Bridge; the larger vessels--evidences of an ocean-going commerce--in and around the docks on either hand; even the smoke and shadows, and the dirt itself in the streets and lanes, might have been reckoned fine pictorial elements of interest in a foreign seaport.