Shortly after it has received the Derwent and passed by the locks communicating with the Erewash canal, the Trent is joined by another affluent, on its opposite bank. This is the Soar, which, for the latter part of its course, bounds on the west a portion of the county of Nottingham. Rising in the Leicestershire uplands, some miles to the south of the county town, it passes--traversing a rather wide and open valley--by Leicester itself, skirting the precincts of the Abbey--now marked by but scanty ruins--where Cardinal Wolsey died in the "winter of his discontent," disgraced by the king whom he had too well served. Then it flows northward by the lime-kilns of Barrow, and near the granite quarries of Mount Sorrel, wandering through water meadows, flat and at times flooded, but for several miles bounded on its western side by the rugged hills of Charnwood Forest, that insular outcrop of old-world rock which so strangely interrupts the monotonous opulence of the "red marl" scenery, and makes a little Wales in England. To the Soar come tributary streams from the pasture lands of Leicester, dear to the fox-hunter, which tributaries, like the river itself, glide past many a quiet village, of which the churches are often of no little interest, and the houses not seldom afford to us excellent specimens of the domestic architecture of our country from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The junction of the Soar is not far from another junction, which has given both an origin and a name to what is rapidly becoming a town. Here the main line of the Midland Railway receives one or two important tributaries, and as the result, Trent Junction has sprung up. As we approach, tall factories are seen to rise above lines of red-brick houses, and the College--a young but important school, which has helped to make the name of the place familiar--is conspicuous just on the outskirts of the town. The valley here is wide and level, and the scenery naturally becomes a little monotonous, but its right bank, near to which the river, for a time, is flowing, is sometimes rather steeply scarped. One of the prettiest spots is near to the place where the railway crosses the Trent, shortly after emerging from the cutting which conducts it from the valley of the Soar to that of the main river. The side of the valley is steep and broken, a pleasant combination of rough grassy slope and clustering trees. The uniform flow of the water is interrupted by a weir, and its surface is flecked with white bubbles, roughened and broken for a time with ripples, while above and below the bridge our eyes range up and down the level meadows broken but slightly with lines of green hedges and dots of trees.