radually melt away into the indefinite blue edge of the
world where the hills of Wensleydale rise from the plain. Looking across
the little town of Guisborough, lying near the shelter of the hills, to
the broad sweep of the North Sea, this piece of Yorkshire seems so small
that one almost expects to see the Cheviots away in the north. But,
beyond the winding Tees and the drifting smoke of the great
manufacturing towns on its banks, one must be content with the county of
Durham, a huge section of which is plainly visible. Turning towards the
brown moorlands, the cultivation is exchanged for ridge beyond ridge of
total desolation--a huge tract of land in this crowded England where the
population for many square miles at a time consists of the inmates of a
lonely farm or two in the circumscribed cultivated areas of the dales.

Eight or nine hundred years ago these valleys were choked up with
forests. The Early British inhabitants were more inclined to the
hill-tops than the hollows, if the innumerable indications of their
settlements be any guide, and there is every reason for believing that
many of the hollows in the folds of the heathery moorlands were rarely
visited by man. Thus, the suggestion has been made that a few of the
last representatives of now extinct monsters may have survived in these
wild retreats, for how otherwise do we find persistent stories in these
parts of Yorkshire, handed down we cannot tell how many centuries, of
strange creatures described as 'worms'? At Loftus they show you the spot
where a 'grisly worm' had its lair, and in many places there are
traditions of strange long-bodied dragons who were slain by various
valiant men.

When we remember that the last wolf was killed in Scotland in the
seventeenth century, that Africa is still adding to the list of living
animals, and that the caves at Kirkdale, near Kirby Moorside, revealed
the bones of elephants, tigers, hyenas, and rhinoceroses, in an
excellent state of preservation, though they were all broken, we are
inclined to believe that these strange stories may have had some
basis of fact.

On Easby Moor, a few miles to the south of Roseberry Topping, the tall
column to the memory of Captain Cook stands like a lighthouse on this
inland coast-line. The lofty position it occupies among these brown and
purply-green heights makes the monument visible over a great tract of
the sailor's native Cleveland. The people who live in Marton, the
village o