e seen some of the finest
sea-pictures on this part of the coast. But although I have seen
beautiful effects at all times of the day, those that I remember more
than any others are the early mornings, when the sun was still low in
the heavens, when, standing on that fine stretch of yellow sand, one
seemed to breathe an atmosphere so pure, and to gaze at a sky so
transparent, that some of those undefined longings for surroundings
that have never been realized were instinctively uppermost in the mind.
It is, I imagine, that vague recognition of perfection which has its
effect on even superficial minds when impressed with beautiful scenery,
for to what other cause can be attributed the remark one hears, that
such scenes 'make one feel good'?

Heavy waves, overlapping one another in their fruitless bombardment of
the smooth shelving sand, are filling the air with a ceaseless thunder.
The sun, shining from a sky of burnished gold, throws into silhouette
the twin lighthouses at the entrance to Whitby Harbour, and turns the
foaming wave-tops into a dazzling white, accentuated by the long
shadows of early day. Away to the north-west is Sandsend Ness, a bold
headland full of purple and blue shadows, and straight out to sea,
across the white-capped waves, are two tramp steamers, making, no
doubt, for South Shields or some port where a cargo of coal can be
picked up. They are plunging heavily, and every moment their bows seem
to go down too far to recover.

The two little becks finding their outlet at East Row and Sandsend are
lovely to-day; but their beauty must have been much more apparent
before the North-Eastern Railway put their black lattice girder bridges
across the mouth of each valley. But now that familiarity with these
bridges, which are of the same pattern across every wooded ravine up
the coast-line to Redcar, has blunted my impressions, I can think of
the picturesqueness of East Row without remembering the railway. It was
in this glen, where Lord Normanby's lovely woods make a background for
the pretty tiled cottages, the mill, and the old stone bridge, which
make up East Row,[1] that the Saxons chose a home for their god Thor.
Here they built some rude form of temple, afterwards, it seems,
converted into a hermitage. This was how the spot obtained the name
Thordisa, a name it retained down to 1620, when the requirements of
workmen from the newly-started alum-works at Sandsend led to building
operations by the side