The long ridge of Cross Fell was grey and cloudlike, as seen in the morning sunshine, from where our pair of horses finished their journey at the Green Hurth Mines. The intervening space of undulating moor was as parched and brown as if some sudden flame had swept across it; and where the clouds moved slowly across the grey-blue of the sky, long bands of dark shadow fell, so intense as to lend the brightness of contrast to what otherwise might itself have seemed to be a mass of shade. Not a single tree was in sight, but only whin-bushes and their yellow bloom. A white gleam of water in occasional hollows of the hills indicated the sluggish beck which divides Durham from Cumberland; and to the left, in a winding course well marked by the depression of the moorlands, the Tees wandered towards Caldron Snout, flanked by the steep side of Dufton Fell. It is here but a thin and narrow stream on dry summer days, but in times of rain it broadens and swells with an amazing suddenness, rushing downwards with a great roar and tumult of waters, so unexpected, sometimes, and with a character so much resembling the opposite phenomenon of the bore on the Severn, that holiday visitors, inapprehensive of calamity, have before now been carried headlong over the terrible cataract of High Force. [Illustration: _Walker & Boutall sc._ THE COURSE OF THE TEES.] The guide-book accounts of Upper Teesdale are mainly remarkable for their singular inattention to facts, and their following of each other. "Murray" confidently places High Force at a distance of five miles below the source of the river at Cross Fell. As a plain matter of fact, it is five miles from High Force to Caldron Snout, a much more amazing waterfall, and there are more than seven miles as the crow flies between Caldron Snout and Tees Head. It is a country bare of inhabitants and abounding in game. There is no village beyond Langdon Beck, where we begin the ascent of the moors. The Tees is joined by numerous little streams before it leaves Cumberland, and flows through the four or five miles of stern valley where Westmorland and Durham face each other. Just before reaching the wild extremity of Yorkshire it thrusts out a broad arm through a deep, long recess of the hills, and "as with molten glass inlays the vale." The Weel is the odd and unaccountable name which has been given to this winding lake. It lies, white and weird and still, where scarcely even the winds can reach it; and so deserted is it that not so much as a single wild fowl breaks the surface of its ghastly calm. There is henceforth no more rest to the Tees water during the whole of its curiously devious journeying to the sea. Below the Weel it tumbles with desperate tumult over Caldron Snout, foaming down into a pool two hundred feet beneath. Had Southey beheld this waterfall when it was in flood he would scarcely have had the heart to write of the Falls of Lodore. Here there are no mossy