it is all dry ground thereabouts at present. The fertility of the country and the general wealth of the people had greatly increased with this improvement; yet withal, ever since the time Boston, in Massachusetts, was named in honor of old Boston, in Lincolnshire, people had been going thence to America. But surely, thought I, none have found their way back to Marehamle-Fen; but I was mistaken, for there came in during the evening a young fellow from Potosi, Missouri, who had moreover brought with him a Texas cow-boy's saddle wherewith to astonish the natives. My disappointment at not being the Columbus of the village, did not prevent my sleeping soundly in a bed, the like of which as to size has not been seen in America since the Revolution. The headboard made me think of the front of a Kansas clapboard court house, while the bed was the public square.

The next stopping-place was York, a famous old place, where is the great minster, nearly as familiar to Americans from pictures as the capitol at Washington. I do not propose to describe this wonderful building, as the purpose of this letter is more particularly to speak of the country, not the town. I may remark, though, in passing, that York minster is built of magnesian limestone, as is the capitol at Topeka; and as the minster has lasted some four or five hundred years, so we may hope that the present wing of the Kansas State House will endure even till the completion of the Insane Asylum. In the heart of York, I saw a bit of green grass inclosed by a high wall, which interested me. It is the ancient burying-ground of the Friends, long deserted, and in it is buried Lindley Murray. It would not take long to parse the last simple sentence about the old grammarian, for, with Quaker plainness, it only says, that he was born, and that he died. It

does not even mention that a generation of Americans learned grammar out of his little book- a generation now gone, or going; for of those who in so many country school houses, on so many drowsy afternoons, said over and over, “I love,” and “you love,” and "we love," most are gone away to another country, where we would fain hope that He loves. The decent body who showed me the place knew nothing about the man of the oldtime grammar, but perhaps Mr. Pontefract, the grocer at the corner, could tell me; but Mr. P. knew very little about his coreligionist who labored so zealously to convince men that the personal pronoun, "you," should be used only in the second person plural. But he knew, he said, a young man from AmericaLindley Murray Hoag. There is no getting away, you see, from America-or from Kansas, for that matter.

In Yorkshire, I lived several days with the Doctor, and journeyed about, visiting, among other places, that most graceful of monastic ruins, Fountains Abbey. I passed near, but did not visit, Knaresborough, the scene of "Eugene Aram." Yorkshire is a very large county, and has a bolder and more impressive landscape than Lincolnshire. It has those "voluptuous swells," once spoken of by a Kansas Senator in connection with the Osage ceded lands, and the horizon is usually skirted by brown hills, where grows the heather, which, near at hand, reveals a little pink flower, and in the distance shows in color from purple to black. This applies to the country about Ripon; but in going north, to Scotland from Leeds, you cross Blea moor, which is the abomination of desolation; and it was in the moors that I saw the last of rural England. I saw it first in sunshine in Cheshire -I left it in shadow in Yorkshire.

Such are a few impressions of the English country; and the idea that seems most vivid in closing is, that in America, Time is a destroying radical-in England, an easy conservative. With us, nothing will ever be old; in England, few things seem young or new. The perpetual moisture of which travelers complain so much, keeps England-country England-cool and fresh and gently fair. It robs tower and wall and bridge of the gloss of newness, and gives, instead, the placid beauty of well-kept age. Alien though I am, born in the land of the prairie and the sun, as different a country from England as can well be imagined, I can well understand the sentiment which an Englishman feels for his own, his native land. Not his country in an abstract sense; not her laws, her institutions, her history, but her very earth. No turf is brighter and greener than the English sod, unbroken by the plow since history began. Larger streams there are, but none more beautiful than those which mirror the primroses and the cowslips of England. Life runs with quicker flow in the towns of the new world, which spring up in the sun-bright wilderness in a day; but I can well understand how amid such, the Englishman's heart may pine for the single winding street of his native village, with its straw-thatched cottages; the stone cross in the middle of the market-place; the square-towered church, with ivy overgrown; and the honest face of the village clock, which told off the hours of his forefathers, and which he laid awake at nights and listened to as it measured his own. Such are the scenes which have inspired the noblest descriptive poetry in our language; such are the scenes amid which have been nursed souls, brave, tender and true, which, going abroad into all the world, for this two hundred years or more, have led mankind to a higher and brighter destiny.

FIRST HOURS IN SCOTLAND.

T Leeds I made the acquaintance of the great Midland Railway, the most enterprising railroad corporation in England-the first to introduce Pullman cars, the first to do away with second-class carriages, making everybody ride "first" or "third," and at the same time improving the "third" so as to make it good enough for anybody—a step which has earned for the Midland the name of the "Radical Company."

It was raining heavily when we left Leeds, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and the falling rain, mingling with the rising smoke from the manufacturing towns we ran through, brought on a darkness that might be felt. At Keighley the hills just back of the town could not be seen, and at this I felt sorry; for high up in those hills is the dreary village of Haworth, where that strange family, the Brontës, lived, suffered, achieved fame-one of them -and died. It was not so much on account of "Jane Eyre" that I wished to look, even afar off, at the scenes amid which it was written, but to find some explanation for "Wuthering Heights," as written by another sister, and which I firmly believe to be the most blood-chilling book in existence. I wished to know if in "Merrie England" there existed a region as desolate as that depicted in that book. I saw nothing at Keighley, but farther on we came upon a "lone land," the Yorkshire "wolds," where a

solitary, sensitive woman might easily imagine anything. High,

woodless hills rise behind each other, strewn with patches of brown heather, and great ledges of gray rock, patched with mouldering moss. Here is no sight of spire nor sound of bell. For miles there is not visible a furrow, and a few scattering sheep seem the only inhabitants. The few houses that appear in this solitude are shapeless structures, built of the gray rock, with an outside stairway, built of rock also. They stand amid the moss and rock and heather without even a bit of garden ground to break the sullen waste. Take from this poor land the vanishing brightness of the summer's green, fill it with drifting snow pursued by the homeless wind, and you have the scene of "Wuthering Heights."

Approaching Westmoreland, the country becomes, so to speak, more "human." A depression amid the high hills, called the "Vale of Dent," is quite a paradise, and by the time you reach Carlisle you are in the midst of a level, pretty country again.

Darkness settled soon after the train sped away from Carlisle, and little could be made out save that we were passing through a hilly country. We made a few stops, one of them being amidst the lights of a manufacturing town-Hawick-which the Scotch people called "Hyke." Somewhere about 8 o'clock came Melrose, and-bed.

Melrose, as seen in a morning with more rain than sun, looks much like an English village, though not so well cared for. Near by rise two high, bare eminences, the Eildon hills (there are three of them, but two make themselves conspicuous). Somewhere in the vicinity is the Tweed, and down street, a few steps away from the station, is Melrose Abbey.

I realized, when I stepped into the inclosure about this old

K