--, who lived at Roe Head, a cheerful roomy country
house, standing a little apart in a field, on the right of the road from
Leeds to Huddersfield. Three tiers of old-fashioned semicircular bow
windows run from basement to roof; and look down upon a long green slope
of pasture-land, ending in the pleasant woods of Kirklees, Sir George
Armitage's park. Although Roe Head and Haworth are not twenty miles
apart, the aspect of the country is as totally dissimilar as if they
enjoyed a different climate. The soft curving and heaving landscape
round the former gives a stranger the idea of cheerful airiness on the
heights, and of sunny warmth in the broad green valleys below. It is
just such a neighbourhood as the monks loved, and traces of the old
Plantagenet times are to be met with everywhere, side by side with the
manufacturing interests of the West Riding of to-day. There is the park
of Kirklees, full of sunny glades, speckled with black shadows of
immemorial yew-trees; the grey pile of building, formerly a "House of
professed Ladies;" the mouldering stone in the depth of the wood, under
which Robin Hood is said to lie; close outside the park, an old stone-
gabled house, now a roadside inn, but which bears the name of the "Three
Nuns," and has a pictured sign to correspond. And this quaint old inn is
frequented by fustian-dressed mill-hands from the neighbouring worsted
factories, which strew the high road from Leeds to Huddersfield, and form
the centres round which future villages gather. Such are the contrasts
of modes of living, and of times and seasons, brought before the
traveller on the great roads that traverse the West Riding. In no other
part of England, I fancy, are the centuries brought into such close,
strange contact as in the district in which Roe Head is situated. Within
six miles of Miss W---'s house--on the left of the road, coming from
Leeds--lie the remains of Howley Hall, now the property of Lord Cardigan,
but formerly belonging to a branch of the Saviles. Near to it is Lady
Anne's well; "Lady Anne," according to tradition, having been worried and
eaten by wolves as she sat at the well, to which the indigo-dyed factory
people from Birstall and Batley woollen mills would formerly repair on
Palm Sunday, when the waters possess remarkable medicinal efficacy; and
it is still believed by some that they assume a strange variety of
colours at six o'clock on the morning of that day.

All round the lands