from the great, busy town on the north, I passed by the
estates and residences of its manufacturing aristocracy. The homes
they have built and embellished should satisfy the tastes and
ambitions of any hereditary nobility. They need only a little more
age to make them rival many baronial establishments. It is
interesting to see how the different classes of society are stepping
into each other's shoes in going up into higher grades of social
life. The merchant and manufacturing princes of England have not
only reached but surpassed the conditions of wealth, taste and
elegance which the hereditary peers of the realm occupied a century
ago; while the latter have gone up to the rich and luxurious
surroundings of kings and queens of that period. The upward
movement has reached the very lowest strata of society. Not only
have the small tradesmen and farmers ascended to the comfortable
conditions of large merchants and landowners of one hundred years
ago, but common day laborers are lifted upward by the general
uprising. I should not wonder if all the damp, low cellarless
cottages they now frequently inhabit should be swept away in less
than fifty years and replaced by as comfortable buildings as the
great middle class occupied in the childhood of the present
generation.

I found comfortable quarters for the night in the little village of
Bramhope, about five miles from Leeds. The next day I walked to
Harrogate, passing through Otley and across the celebrated Wharf
Vale. The scenery of this valley, as it opens upon you suddenly on
descending from the south into Otley, is exceedingly beautiful; not
so extensive as that of Belvoir Vale, but with all the features of
the latter landscape compressed in a smaller space; like a portrait
taken on a smaller scale. As you look off from the southern ridge
or wall of the valley, you seem to stand on the cord of a segment of
a circle, the radius of which touches the horizon at about five
miles to the north. This crescent is filled with the most delicate
lineaments of Nature's beauty. The opposite walls of the gallery
slope upward from the meandering Wharf so gently and yet reach the
blue ceiling of the sky so near, that all the paintings that panel
them are vividly distinct to your eye, and you can group all their
lights and shades in the compass of a single glance.

On the opposite side, half hidden and half revealed among the trees
of an ample park, stands Farnley Hall, a