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A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD NINE DAYS' WONDER IN YORK TWO YORKISH EPISODES A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER

A VIEW OF MONK BAR ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LIVERPOOL THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD YORK MINSTER--THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN ST. MARY'S ABBEY CLIFFORD'S TOWER YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER DURHAM CATHEDRAL--NORTHWEST VIEW FINCHALE PRIORY DURHAM CATHEDRAL--ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE RIVER THE "STUMP" OF ST. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY MARKET-PLACES THE RIVER AT EVENING LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS LLANDUDNO--THE CITY AND HARBOR LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME'S NECK THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO CONWAY CASTLE PLAS MAWR A PRESENTATION AT COURT THE ENGLISH HOUSEMAID LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS

A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL

Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in the transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from Liverpool to any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is most worthy to be seen and known, and no one who looks up from the bacon and eggs of his first hotel breakfast after landing, and finds himself confronted by the coal-smoked Greek architecture of St. George's Hall, can deny that it is of a singularly noble presence. The city has moments of failing in the promise of this classic edifice, but every now and then it reverts to it, and reminds the traveller that he is in a great modern metropolis of commerce by many other noble edifices.

Liverpool does not remind him of this so much as the good and true Baedeker professes, in the dockside run on the overhead railway ; but then, as I noted in my account of Southampton, docks have a fancy of taking themselves in, and eluding the tourist eye, and even when they "flank the Mersey for a distance of 6-7 M." they do not respond to American curiosity so frankly as could be wished. They are like other English things in that, however, and it must be said for them that when apparent they are sometimes unimpressive. From my own note-book, indeed, I find that I pretended to think them "wonderful and almost endless," and so I dare say they are. But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of our day at Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.

Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and pleasant, through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the meadows the elms seemed to droop like our own rather than to hold themselves oakenly upright like the English; the cattle stood about in the yellow buttercups, knee-deep, white American daisies, and red clover, and among the sheep we had our choice of shorn and unshorn; they were equally abundant. Some of the blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns, and over all the sky hovered, with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces of air like an inverted lake of bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at Chester, and the next evening, in the full daylight of 7.40, we pushed on to Liverpool, over lovely levels, with a ground swell like that of Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its tears and at last radiantly smiling.

The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous American arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on account of them, to plead for a room. A dense group of our countrywomen were buying picture-postals of the rather suave office-ladies, and helplessly fawning on them in the inept confidences of American women with all persons in official or servile attendance. "Let me stay here," one of them entreated, "because there's such a draught at the other window. May I?" She was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I do not know whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not, tender creature. As she was in every one else's way there, possibly she was harshly driven into the flaw at the other window.

The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with the arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift English trains bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many familiar accents remained till the morning, and the breakfast-room was full of a nasal resonance which would have made one at home anywhere in our East or West. I, who was then vainly trying to be English, escaped to the congenial top of the farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate of four miles an hour, to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither no rumor of my native speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my wounded pride of country to note how pale and small the average type of the local people was. The poorer classes swarmed along a great part of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and what characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed to prevail. You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without great adversity, just as you cannot have day without night, and the more Liverpool evidently flourished the more it plainly languished. I found no pleasure in the paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick villas of the suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But then, after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that distance, and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.

At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought it too thatched and too cottage to be quite true , and accepted the hospitality of a pastry-cook's shop. We felt the more at home with the kind woman who kept it because she had a brother at Chicago in the employ of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and had once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this doubly satisfied us as cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and she testified to a great prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population of Liverpool; besides, she sent us to a church of the Crusaders at Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not find it. We found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby is named, and this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at the intersection of the streets in what seemed the fragment of a village, not yet lost in the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the simple neighborhood, so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long, long minute till the tram came by and took us back into the loud, hard heart of Liverpool.

I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than the hearts of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from the many young couples who were out together half-holidaying in the unusually pleasant Saturday weather. I wish their complexions had been better, but you cannot have South-of-England color if you live as far north as Liverpool, and all the world knows what the American color is. The young couples abounded in the Gallery of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked at one another instead of the pictures. The pictures might have been better, but then they might have been worse ; and in any case those couples could come and see them when they were old men and women; but now they had one another in a moment of half-holiday which could not last forever.

In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the half-dozen groups. Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was one perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers, and who had more of his aspirates in the right place. Many of his hearers were in the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his words did their poor hearts good.

Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent so unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in Italian. He was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse together concerning the English. His ideas of them were often so parallel with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them an improvident people. I owned that they spent much more on state, or station, than the Americans; but we neither had any censure for them otherwise. He was of that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to encounter in the Latin races, and I could well wish for his further acquaintance. His talk rapt me to far other and earlier scenes, and I seemed to be conversing with him under a Venetian heaven, among objects of art more convincing than the equestrian statue of the late Queen, who had no special motive I could think of for being shown to her rightly loving subjects on horseback. We parted with the expressed hope of seeing each other again, and if this should meet his eye and he can recall the pale young man, with the dark full beard, who chatted with him between the pillars of the Piazzetta, forty years before our actual encounter I would be glad of his address.

The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry for our human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the beautiful, the historical. With the almost immediate transference of the original transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the only place where you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the rest, would land you nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land you at Glasgow; worse schismatics carried you to Southampton; there were heterodox craft that touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling agnostics bring you to London itself. Still, Liverpool remains the greatest port of entry for our probationers, who are bound out to the hotels and railroad companies of all Europe till they have morally paid back their fare. The superstition that if you go in a Cunarder you can sleep on both ears is no longer so exclusive as it once was; yet the Cunarder continues an ark of safety for the timid and despairing, and the cooking is so much better than it used to be that if in contravention of the old Cunard rule against a passenger's being carried overboard you do go down, you may be reasonably sure of having eaten something that the wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.

I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the arriving Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression of their exceeding multitude. Expresses, panting with as much impatience as the disciplined English expresses ever suffer themselves to show, await them in the stations, which are effectively parts of the great hotels, and whir away to London with them as soon as they can drive up from the steamer; but many remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads and legs, and to prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel conditions. These the successive trains carry into the heart of the land everywhere, these and their baggage, to which they continue attached by their very heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class corridor compartments to the different luggage-vans. I must say they have very tenderly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people and railroad folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered exiles, in a reassuring and consoling embrace which leaves all their hands--they are Briarean--free for the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust yourself implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not trust the head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern, for then you will have to change four times on the way and at every junction personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew to its destination.

SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER

I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in compliance with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where there is perhaps no other reason for his going. He will there, for one thing, find the supreme type of the railroad hotel which in England so promptly shelters and so kindly soothes the fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than at Liverpool, we are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel, which is indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an American ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or even a ticking, clock in the transom above one's bedroom door; but the like type of hotel is to be found at every great railroad centre or terminal in England, and it is never to be found quite bad, though of course it is sometimes better and sometimes worse. It is hard to know if it is more hotel or more station; perhaps it is a mixture of each which defies analysis; but in its well-studied composition you pass, as it were, from your car to your room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting the fact poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at the most; and when you have entered your room your train has ceased to be. The simple miracle would be impossible in America, where our trains, when not shrieking at the tops of their whistles, are backing and filling with a wild clangor of their bells, and making a bedlam of their stations; but in England they

"Come like shadows, so depart,"

and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.

These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest wonder of England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some ways more wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much planned on our native methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a merit, of antedating our Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-historically it is indefinitely older. My sole recorded impression of it is that I found it smelling strongly of coal-gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing centre; and it would be paltering with the truth not to own a general sense of the beauty and grandeur in it which no English cathedral is without. The morning was fitly dim and chill, and one could move about in the vague all the more comfortably for the absence of that appeal of thronging monuments which harasses and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals; one could really give one's self up to serious emotion, and not be sordidly and rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester has been an episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the cathedral was simply T' Owd Church, and in this character it is still venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of Oliver Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square before it. Call it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least not accused of stabling his horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or despoiling it of its sacred images and stained glass, and he merits a monument there if anywhere.

With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the episcopacy is, and perhaps of that older Manchester which held for him against the king, and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford, the first martyr of the Reformation to suffer death at the stake in Smithfield. Of the still yet older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with the Greeks of Marseilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was a Roman military station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the Saxons, and was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by the Normans, there may be traces in the temperament of the modern town which would escape even the scrutiny of the hurried American. Such a compatriot was indeed much more bent upon getting a pair of cotton socks, like those his own continent wears almost universally in summer, but a series of exhaustive visits to all the leading haberdashers in Manchester developed the strange fact that there, in the world-heart of the cotton-spinning industry, there was no such thing to be found. In Manchester there are only woollen socks, heavier or lighter, to be bought, and the shopmen smile pityingly if you say, in your strange madness, that woollen socks are not for summer wear. Possibly, however, it was not summer in Manchester, and we were misled by the almanac. Possibly we had been spoiled by three weeks of warm, sunny rain on the Welsh coast, and imagined a vain thing in supposing that the end of August was not the beginning of November.

I thought Manchester, however, as it shows itself in its public edifices, a most dignified town, with as great beauty as could be expected of a place which has always had so much to do besides looking after its figure and complexion. The very charming series or system of parks, public gardens, and playgrounds, unusual in their number and variety, had a sympathetic allure in the gray, cool light, even to the spectator passing in a hurried hansom. They have not the unity of the Boston or Chicago parkways, and I will own that I had not come to Manchester for them. What interested me more were the miles and miles of comfortable-looking little brick houses in which, for all I knew, the mill-labor dwelt. Very possibly it did not; the mills themselves are now nearly all, or mostly, outside of Manchester, and perhaps for this reason I did not find the slums, when shown them, very slummy, and I saw no such dreadful shapes of rags and dirt as in Liverpool. We passed through a quarter of large, old-fashioned mansions, as charming as they were unimagined of Manchester; but these could not have been the dwellings of the mill-hands, any more than of the mill-owners. The mill-owners, at least, live in suburban palaces and villas, which I fancy by this time are not

--"pricking a cockney ear,"

as in the time of Tennyson's "Maud."

What wild and whirling insolences, however, the people who have greatly made the greatness of England have in all times suffered from their poets and novelists, with few exceptions! One need not be a very blind devotee of commercialism or industrialism to resent the affronts put upon them, when one comes to the scenes of such mighty achievement as Liverpool, and Manchester, and Sheffield; but how mildly they seem to have taken it all--with what a meek subordination and sufferance! One asks one's self whether the society of such places can be much inferior to that of Pittsburg, or Chicago, or St. Louis, which, even from the literary attics of New York, we should not exactly allow ourselves to spit upon. Practically, I know nothing about society in Manchester, or rather, out of it; and I can only say of the general type, of richer or poorer, as I saw it in the streets, that it was uncommonly good. Not so many women as men were abroad in such weather as we had, and I cannot be sure that the sex shows there that superiority physically which it has long held morally with us. One learns in the north not to look for the beautiful color of the south and west; but in Manchester the average faces were intelligent and the figures good.

I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it, was very cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge lowries, as the wagons are called, passing through the streets with the cotton fabrics of the place in certain stages of manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps the finished material. In Manchester itself one sees not much else of "the cotton-spinning chorus" which has sent its name so far. The cotton is now spun in ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood of the great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one or two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief stay; but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start up for the sake of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and I had to come away without mine.

When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was borne to the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the important scene, I hope. The building itself, like the other public buildings of Manchester, is most dignified, and the great hall of the exchange is very noble. I would not, if I could, have repressed a thrill of pride in seeing our national colors and emblems equalled with those of Great Britain at one end of the room, but these were the only things American in the impression left. We made our way through the momently thickening groups on the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange found a favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the vast space below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few silk toppers among them, but a multitude of panamas and other straws. The marketing was not carried on with anything like the wild, rangy movement of our Stock Exchange, and the floor sent up no such hell-roaring tumult as rises from the mad but not malign demons of that most dramatic representation of perdition. The merchants, alike staid, whether old or young, congregated in groups which, dealing in a common type of goods, kept the same places till, toward three o'clock, they were lost in the mass which covered the floor. Even then there was no uproar, no rush or push, no sharp cries or frenzied shouting; but from the crowd, which was largely made up of elderly men, there rose a sort of surd, rich hum, deepening ever, and never breaking into a shriek of torment or derision. It was not histrionic, and yet for its commercial importance it was one of the most moving spectacles which could offer itself to the eye in the whole world.

I cannot pretend to have profited by my visit to that immensely valuable deposit of books, bought from the Spencer family at Althorp, and dedicated as the Rylands library to the memory of a citizen of Manchester. Books in a library, except you have time and free access to them, are as baffling as so many bottles in a wine-cellar, which are not opened for you, and which if they were would equally go to your head without final advantage. I find, therefore, that my sole note upon the Rylands Library is the very honest one that it smelt, like the cathedral, of coal-gas. The absence of this gas was the least merit of the beautiful old Chetham College, with its library dating from the seventeenth century, and claiming to have been the first free library in England, and doubtless the world. In the cloistered picturesqueness of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its ancient peace, I found myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are nowhere quite wanting in England, and against which I rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I had come to Manchester for.

IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD

If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful Derbyshire country which lies, or rather rolls, between Manchester and Sheffield, I could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural landscape. I do not know just the measure of the Black Country in England, or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps the blackest spot in it; but I am sure that nothing not surgically clean could be whiter than the roads that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester, began to climb the green, thickly wooded hills, and dip into the grassy and leafy valleys. In the very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most nobly posed against a lurid sunset, and clouding the sky, which can never be certain of being blue, with the smoke of a thousand towering chimneys. From whatever point you have it, the sight is most prodigious, but no doubt the subjective sense of the great ducal mansions and estates which neighbor the mirky metropolis of steel and iron has its part in heightening the dramatic effect.

I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang I inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation to my soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would have been folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence. But would it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further it could not? I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to give the sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to make it a shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly handsome. It is astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in this instance I owe the permanence of my pang to those frequent appeals to one's pity which repeated themselves in Sheffield. As I had noted at Liverpool I now noted at Sheffield that you cannot have great prosperity without having adversity, just as you cannot have heat without cold or day without dark. The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I perceived that wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of somebody; though even when business pines it is apparently no better. The thing ought to be looked into.

At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many works were running half-time or no time, and many people were out of work. At one place there was a little oblong building between branching streets, round which sat a miserable company of Murchers, as I heard them called, on long benches under the overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who were almost offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some dull and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks, and they were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their apathy or their grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or from their work at dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale, with no color of that south of England bloom with which they might have favored a stranger. Slatternly girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by a little larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers of dirt. There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked as they were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of cookshops which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced to the steaming and smoking dishes within. The very morning after I had denied that man a penny at the theatre door, and was still smarting to think I had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten, in the cut-down tatters of a man, gloating upon a meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set behind the pane in front of him. I took out the sixpence which I ought to have given that poor man, and made it a shilling, and put it into the boy's wonderfully dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie. He looked at me, and he looked at the shilling, and then I suppose he did as he was bid. But I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I never did anything of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield. I felt that I owed a duty to the place and must not go about corrupting the populace for my selfish pleasure.

Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted, and beyond it in every direction the chimneys of the many works thickened in the perspectives. It was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts of shipping in a thronged port; or the vents of tellurian fires, which send up their flames by night and their smoke by day. It was splendid, it was magnificent, it was insurpassably picturesque. People must have painted it often, but if some bravest artist-soul would come, reverently, not patronizingly, and portray the sight in its naked ugliness, he would create one of the most beautiful masterpieces in the world. On our first morning the sun, when it climbed to the upper heavens, found a little hole in the dun pall, and shone down through it, and tried to pierce through the more immediate cloud above the works; but it could not, and it ended by shutting the hole under it, and disappearing.

Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the works, and smelling of the decay of market-houses, were fine streets of shops and churches, and I dare say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and descending their hilly slopes. The stores I find noted as splendid, and in my pocket-book I say that outside of the market-house, before you got to those streets, there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as a raven for sale in cages; and the usual horrible English display of flesh meats. The trams were one story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and there were plenty of them; but nothing could keep me, I suppose, till I had seen one of the works. Each of these stands in a vast yard, or close, by itself, with many buildings, and they are of all sorts; but I chose what I thought the most typical, and overcame the reluctance of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade, but was presently out of work, and glad to earn my fee.

There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there is an unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be in a place that began life, in the usual English fashion, under the Britons and grew into municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Romans and the ruder nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of the last, and the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose and led Sheffield men back to battle in France, where the first earl fell on the bloody field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453 that there was not a house in all the region which did not mourn a loss. Which of the Roses Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not sure; but we will say that it duly suffered for one or the other; and it is certain that the great Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen days at Sheffield Manor just before he went to die at Leicester; and Mary Queen of Scots spent fourteen years of sorrowful captivity, sometimes at the Manor and sometimes in Sheffield Castle. This hold was taken by the Parliamentarians in the Civil War; but the famous industries of the place had begun long before; so that Chaucer could say of one of his pilgrims,

"A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose."

Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from Liverpool in 1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed the best in the world. Manufactures flourished there apace when England turned to them from agriculture, and Sheffield is now a city of four hundred thousand or more. Apparently it has been growing radical, as the centres of prosperity and adversity always do, and the days of the Chartist agitation continued there for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near open rebellion as it well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then that cause of the people, like many another, failed, and liberty there, as elsewhere in England, was fain to

"broaden slowly down From precedent to precedent."

Labor troubles, patient or violent, have followed, as labor troubles must, but leisure has always been equal to their pacification, and now Sheffield takes its adversity almost as quietly as its prosperity.

We were not there, though, for others' labor or leisure, which we have plenty of at home; but even before I appeased such conscience as I had about seeing a type of the works, we went a long drive up out of the town to that Manor where the poor, brilliant, baddish Scotch queen was imprisoned by her brilliant, baddish English cousin. In any question of goodness, there was little to choose between them; both were blood-stained liars; but it is difficult being a good woman and a queen too, and they only failed where few have triumphed. Mary is the more appealing to the fancy because she suffered beyond her deserts, but Elizabeth was to be pitied because Mary had made it politically imperative for her to kill her. All this we had threshed out many times before, and had said that, cat for cat, Mary was the more dangerous because she was the more feminine, and Elizabeth the more detestable because she was the more masculine in her ferocity. We were therefore in the right mood to visit Mary's prison, and we were both indignant and dismayed to find that our driver, called from a mews at a special price set upon his intelligence, had never heard of it and did not know where it was.

We reported his inability to the head porter, who came out of the hotel in a fine flare of sarcasm. "You call yourself a Sheffield man and not know where the Old Manor is!" he began, and presently reduced that proud ignoramus of a driver to such a willingness to learn that we thought it at least safe to set out with him, and so started for the long climb up the hills that hold Sheffield in their hollow. When we reached their crest, we looked down and back through the clearer air upon as strange and grand a sight as could be. It was as if we were looking into the crater of a volcano, which was sending up its smoke through a thousand vents. All detail of the works and their chimneys was lost in the retrospect; one was aware only of a sort of sea of vapor through which they loomed and gloomed.

Our ascent was mostly through winding and climbing streets of little dirty houses, with frowsy gardens beside them, and the very dirtiest-faced children in England playing about them. From time to time our driver had to ask his way of the friendly flat-bosomed slatterns, with babies in their arms, on their thresholds, or the women tending shop, or peddling provisions, who were all kind to him, and assured him with varying degrees of confidence that the Old Manor was a bit, or a goodish bit, beyond. All at once we came upon the sight of it on an open top, hard by what is left of the ruins of the real Manor, where Wolsey stayed that little while from death. The relics are broken walls, higher here, lower there; with some Tudor fireplaces showing through their hollow windows. What we saw in tolerable repair was the tower of the Manor, or the lodge, and we drove to it across a field, on a track made by farm carts, and presently kept by a dog that showed his teeth in a grin not wholly of amusement at our temerity. While we debated whether we had not better let the driver get down and knock, a farmer-like man came to the door and called the dog off. Then, in a rich North Country accent, he welcomed us to his kitchen parlor, where his wife was peeling potatoes for their midday dinner, and so led us up the narrow stone stairs of the tower to the chambers where Mary miserably passed those many long years of captivity.

The rooms were visibly restored in every point where they could have needed restoration, but they were not ruthlessly or too insistently restored. There was even an antique chair, but when our guide was put on his honor as to whether it was one of the original chairs he answered, "Well, if people wanted a chair!" He was a rather charmingly quaint, humorous person, with that queer conscience, and he did not pretend to be moved by the hard inexorable stoniness of the place which had been a queen's prison for many years. One must not judge it too severely, though: bowers and prisons of that day looked much alike, and Mary Stuart may have felt this a bower, and only hated it because she could not get out of it, or anyhow break the relentless hold of that Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury whose captive guest she was, though she never ceased trying. We went up on the wide flat roof, of lead or stone, whither her feet must have so often heavily climbed, and looked out over the lovely landscape which she must have abhorred; and the wind that blew over it, in late August, was very cold; far colder than the air of the prison, or the bower, below.

The place belongs now to the Duke of Norfolk, the great Catholic duke, and owes its restoration to his pity and his piety. Our farmer guide was himself a Protestant, but he spoke well of the duke, with whom he reported himself in such colloquies as, "I says to Dook," and, "Dook says to me." When he understood that we were Americans he asked after a son of his who had gone out to our continent twenty years before. He had only heard from him once, and that on the occasion of his being robbed of all his money by a roommate. It was in a place called Massatusy; we suggested Massachusetts, and he assented that such might be the place; and Mary's prison-house acquired an added pathos.

We drove back through the beautiful park, the Duke of Norfolk's gift to Sheffield, which is plentifully provided, like all English towns, with public pleasure-grounds. They lie rather outside of it, but within it are many and many religious and civic edifices which merit to be seen. We chose as chiefest the ancient Parish Church, of Norman origin and modern restoration, where we visited the tomb of the Lord and Lady Shrewsbury who were Mary Stuart's jailers; or if they were not, a pair of their family were, and it comes to the same thing, emotionally. The chapel in which they lie is most beautiful, and the verger had just brushed the carpet within the chancel to such immaculate dustlessness that he could not bring himself to let us walk over it. He let us walk round it, and we saw the chapel as a favor, which we discharged with an abnormal tip after severe debate whether a person of this verger's rich respectability and perfect manner would take any tip at all. In the event it appeared that he would.

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