I pass on and leave the old man muttering to himself. Pinewoods on our right mingling with the lighter green of the feathery larches. A thundercloud hanging over a town in the plains far away. A duck-pond completely surrounded by trailing roses. Ducks in the pond all head down, tails and yellow feet up. Road suddenly becomes a lovers’ lane, charmingly pretty, and robins are singing in the copses. We are just five miles from Darlington.
We stable our horses at a roadside inn and Foley cooks the dinner.
How very handy sheets of paper come in! Look at that snow-white tablecloth—that is paper; so is the temporary crumb-cloth, and eke my table-napkin; but in fifty other ways in a caravan paper is useful.
The dinner to-day is cold roast beef and floury new potatoes; add to this a delightful salad, and we have a menu a millionaire might not despise.
I write up my log while dinner is cooking, and after that meal has been discussed comes the hour for reading and siesta.
Now the horses are once more put-to, and we start again for Darlington. We pass through the charming village of Croft; it lies on the banks of the Tees, and is a spa of some kind, and well worthy of being a better-frequented resort for the health or pleasure seeker.
The treescapes, the wood and water peeps, are fine just before you reach Darlington. This town itself is one of the prettiest in England. Fully as big but infinitely more beautiful even than Reading.
Wherever we stop we are surrounded by people, so we make haste to shake the dust of civilisation from our carriage-wheels, and are happy when we once more breathe country air, and see neither perambulators nor boarding-school girls.
At the top of a hill some two miles out of town we come upon a cosy wee hotel—the Harrogate Hill Hotel.
“A’ve little convenience,” says the landlord, in his broad Durham brogue, “but A’ll clear anoother stall, and A’ll turn t’ould pony oot o’ his. A’ll mak’ room.”