rocks or sheltering trees to dapple the scene with their brightness and shadow. The river dashes in a succession of leaps over the bare basalt, swirling and boiling after such manner as easily explains the name given to this most lonely and most splendid of English cataracts, where the creamy waters-- "With many a shock Given and received in mutual jeopardy, Dance, like a Bacchanal, from rock to rock, Tossing her frantic thyrsus wide and high!" Here the Tees, in a succession of violent cascades, makes a descent, as we have seen, of two hundred feet. At High Force it falls by only seventy-five feet; but, whereas the lonelier cataract is a long and broken slope, the water at High Force falls with plummet-like directness, in a vast broad sheet when the river is in flood, in two straight white columns when the floods are subsiding, and in a single glittering fall when the river is at its normal height. Here the contrast between the Yorkshire and the Durham side of the Tees first makes itself decisively felt. The steep but still gradual declivity of the Durham side is veiled in woods of birch and beech and fir; on the Yorkshire side the basalt descends sheer to the river's bed, and beyond and above it there is a bare expanse of unprofitable fields, darkened here and there by patches of whin-bush and long streaks of broom. This barren character is maintained, with a gradual decrease of sternness, until the little town of Middleton-in-Teesdale comes in sight. [Illustration: HIGH FORCE.] [Illustration: FROM YORK SIDE.]