Here and there, in the neighborhood of some ancient borough, such as Doncaster, Pontefract, or Ripon, through which lay their route, they came upon broad oases of cultivated lands, with smiling farms and pleasant corn-fields and free English homesteads, stretching along the fertile valley of some blue brimful river; again, and that more frequently, they found small forest-hamlets, wood-embosomed, with their little garths and gardens, clustering about the tower of some inferior feudal chief, literally set in a frame of verdure. Sometimes vast tracks of rich and thriftily-cultured meadow-lands, ever situate in the loveliest places of the shire, pastured by abundant flocks, and dotted with sleek herds of the already celebrated short-horns, told where the monks held their peaceful sway, enjoying the fat of the land; and proclaimed how, in those days at least, the priesthood of Rome were not the sensual, bigot drones, the ignorant, oppressive tyrants, whose whereabout can be now easily detected by the squalid and neglected state of lands and animals and men, whenever they possess the soil and control the people. Such were the famous Abbey-stedes of Fountain's and Jorvaulx, then, as now, both for fertility and beauty, the boast of the West Riding. Still, notwithstanding these pleasant interchanges of rural with forest scenery, occurring so often as to destroy all monotony, and to keep up a delightful anticipation in the mind of the voyager, as to what sort of view would meet his eye on crossing yon hill-top, or turning that curvature of the wood-road, by far the greater portion of their way led them over sandy tracks, meandering like ribbons through wide glades of greensward, under the broad protecting arms of giant oaks and elms and beeches, the soft sod no less refreshing to the tread of the quadrupeds, than was the cool shadow of the twilight trees delicious to the riders. Those forests of the olden day were rarely tangled or thicketlike, unless in marshy levels, where the alder, the willow, and other water-loving shrubs replaced the monarchs of the wild; or where, in craggy gullies, down which brawled impetuous the bright hill-streams, the yew, the holly, and the juniper, mixed with the silvery stems and quivering verdure of the birches, or the deeper hues of the broad-leaved witch-elms and hazels, formed dingles fit for fairy bowers. For the most part, the huge bolls of the forest-trees stood far apart, in long sweeping aisles, as regular as if planted by the hand of man, allowing the grass to grow luxuriantly in the shade, nibbled, by the vast herds of red and fallow deer and roes, into the softest and most even sward that ever tempted the foot of high-born beauty.