gs unfold,
And o'er the waters, 'neath the stars,
The harbour lights behold.

_E. Teschemacher_.

Despite a huge influx of summer visitors, and despite the modern town
which has grown up to receive them, Whitby is still one of the most
strikingly picturesque towns in England. But at the same time, if one
excepts the abbey, the church, and the market-house, there are scarcely
any architectural attractions in the town. The charm of the place does
not lie so much in detail as in broad effects. The narrow streets have
no surprises in the way of carved-oak brackets or curious panelled
doorways, although narrow passages and steep flights of stone steps
abound. On the other hand, the old parts of the town, when seen from a
distance, are always presenting themselves in new apparel.

In the early morning the East Cliff generally appears as a pale grey
silhouette with a square projection representing the church, and a
fretted one the abbey.

But as the sun climbs upwards, colour and definition grow out of the
haze of smoke and shadows, and the roofs assume their ruddy tones. At
midday, when the sunlight pours down upon the medley of houses
clustered along the face of the cliff, the scene is brilliantly
coloured. The predominant note is the red of the chimneys and roofs and
stray patches of brickwork, but the walls that go down to the water's
edge are green below and full of rich browns above, and in many places
the sides of the cottages are coloured with an ochre wash, while above
them all the top of the cliff appears covered with grass. There is
scarcely a chimney in this old part of Whitby that does not contribute
to the mist of blue-grey smoke that slowly drifts up the face of the
cliff, and thus, when there is no bright sunshine, colour and details
are subdued in the haze.

In many towns whose antiquity and picturesqueness are more popular than
the attractions of Whitby, the railway deposits one in some
distressingly ugly modern excrescence, from which it may even be
necessary for a stranger to ask his way to the old-world features he
has come to see. But at Whitby the railway, without doing any harm to
the appearance of the town, at once gives a visitor as typical a scene
of fishing-life as he will ever find. When the tide is up and the
wharves are crowded with boats, this upper portion of Whitby Harbour is
at its best, and to step from the railway compartment entered at King's
Cross into this picturesque scene