TER XV.

SHEFFIELD AND ITS INDIVIDUALITY--THE COUNTRY, ABOVE GROUND AND UNDER
GROUND--WAKEFIELD AND LEEDS--WHARF VALE--FARNLEY HALL--HARROGATE;
RIPLEY CASTLE; RIPON; CONSERVATISM OF COUNTRY TOWNS--FOUNTAIN ABBEY;
STUDLEY PARK--RIEVAULX ABBEY--LORD FAVERSHAM'S SHORT-HORN STOCK.

From Chatsworth I went on to Sheffield, crossing a hilly moorland
belonging to the Duke of Rutland, and containing 10,000 acres in one
solid block. It was all covered with heather, and kept in this
wild, bleak condition for game. Here and there well-cultivated
farms, as it were, bit into this cold waste, rescuing large, square
morsels of land, and making them glow with the warm flush and glory
of luxuriant harvests; thus showing how such great reaches of desert
may be made to blossom like the rose under the hand of human labor.

Here is Sheffield, down here, sweltering, smoking, and sweating,
with face like the tan, under the walls of these surrounding hills.
Here live and labor Briareus and Cyclops of modern mythology. Here
they--

Swing their heavy sledge,
With measured beats and slow;
Like the sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.

Here live the lineal descendants of Thor, christianised to human
industries. Here the great hammer of the Scandinavian Thunderer
descended, took nest, and hatched a brood of ten thousand little
iron beetles for beating iron and steel into shapes and uses that
Tubal Cain never dreamed of. Here you may hear their clatter night
and day upon a thousand anvils. O, Vale of Vulcan! O, Valley of
Knives! Was ever a boy put into trousers, in either hemisphere,
that did not carry in the first pocket made for him one of thy cheap
blades? Did ever a reaper in the Old World or New cut and bind a
sheaf of grain, who did not wield one of thy famous sickles? All
Americans who were boys forty years ago, will remember three English
centres of peculiar interest to them. These were Sheffield,
Colebrook Dale, and Paternoster Row. There was hardly a house or
log cabin between the Penobscot and the Mississippi which could not
show the imprint of these three places, on the iron tea-kettle, the
youngest boy's Barlow knife, and his younger sister's picture-book.
To the juvenile imagination of those times, Sheffield was a huge
jack-knife, Colebrook Dale a porridge-pot, and Paternoster Row a
psalm-book, each in the generative case. How we young reapers used
to discuss th