n the neighbourhood of Loftus, and from
thence to the sea at Skinningrove the valley is green and open to the
heavens. Loftus is on the borders of the Cleveland mining district, and
it is for this reason that the town has grown to a considerable size.
But although the miners' new cottages are unpicturesque, and the church
only dates from 1811, the situation is pretty, owing to the profusion of
trees among the houses. Skinningrove has railway-sidings and
branch-lines running down to it, and on the hill above the cottages
stands a cluster of blast-furnaces. In daylight they are merely ugly,
but at night, with tongues of flame, they speak of the potency of
labour. I can still see that strange silhouette of steel cylinders and
connecting girders against a blue-black sky, with silent masses of flame
leaping into the heavens.

It was long before iron-ore was smelted here, before even the old
alum-works had been started, that Skinningrove attained to some sort of
fame through a wonderful visit, as strange as any of those recounted by
Mr. Wells. It was in the year 1535--for the event is most carefully
recorded in a manuscript of the period--that some fishermen of
Skinningrove caught a Sea Man. This was such an astounding fact to
record that the writer of the old manuscript explains that 'old men that
would be loath to have their credyt crackt by a tale of a stale date,
report confidently that ... a _sea-man_ was taken by the fishers.' They
took him up to an old disused house, and kept him there for many weeks,
feeding him on raw fish, because he persistently refused the other sorts
of food offered him. To the people who flocked from far and near to
visit him he was very courteous, and he seems to have been particularly
pleased with any 'fayre maydes' who visited him, for he would gaze at
them with a very earnest countenance, 'as if his phlegmaticke breaste
had been touched with a sparke of love.' The Sea Man was so well behaved
that the fisher-folk began to feel sufficiently sure of his desire to
live with them to cease to keep watch on his movements. 'One day,' we
are told, 'he prively stoale out of Doores, and ere he coulde be
overtaken recovered the sea, whereinto he plunged himself; yet as one
that woulde not unmanerly depart without taking of his leave, from the
mydle upwardes he raysed his shoulders often above the waves, and
makinge signes of acknowledgeing his good enterteinment to such as
beheld him on the shore, as th