I had to go back along a path which seemed fit only for goats, and of the inconveniences of which the overseer had advertized me. Sometimes it was scarcely a foot broad, and at its sides rose a smooth alum rock of two hundred feet perpendicular height. Along such paths, many of which intersect the rocks, the men work, and hew away the alum ore which lies near the surface. This affords the strangest spectacle you can imagine: the men appear to hang to the wall of rock like swallows, and are often obliged to be pulled up by ropes. Below, in the valley, are large cars for carrying away the ore, which is incessantly heard clattering down the rocks. It took me two hours to see all; and I then drove to the house, where Lord Mulgrave's son (the earl himself being ill of the gout) regaled me very hospitably with an excellent luncheon, and conducted me about the park. It is indebted for its greatest beauties to Nature, to whose rocks, brooks, and wooded glens, you have access through very judiciously-cut roads, some German miles in length. From the house you look from under high oaks and beeches along a velvet turf, upon the sea, covered with a hundred sails. One of the greatest ornaments of the park is the old castle,--a ruin believed to have been originally a Roman fort, and afterwards the castle of the Saxon prince Wanda. At a later period it was given to the ancestor of the present family by King John, as a reward for the murder of the young prince, so touchingly described by Shakspeare. The view from the old battlements is wild and picturesque. In the new castle, which was built fifty years ago in the Gothic style, I was much struck with the portrait of a female ancestor of the present earl, who must have been lovely and no less original; for she is painted in deep mourning, and yet she sits smiling at a window with this inscription in old English: "Since my husband's love was but a jest, so is my mourning but a jest." Young Mr. Phipps told me that a strange accident occurred on a ridge of slate-rocks which run into the sea near the house.--Two girls were sitting on a cliff with their backs to the sea; a sharp fragment of the slate split off from the rock high above them, and falling with increasing velocity cut off the head of one of them, (who was earnestly talking to the other,) so clean, that it rolled to a distance on the sand, while the trunk remained unmoved. The parents are still living in the village. _Ripon, Sept. 27th._ I slept through the night very well in my carriage, breakfasted in the garden of a pretty inn, and then hastened to Studley Park, which contains the famous ruins of Fountain's Abbey, esteemed the largest and most beautiful in England. They far exceeded my expectation, as did the park.--I must describe them to you as I saw them.