We cannot resist such confidence and add further to our burden of oddities such as one gathers, willy nilly, in a tour of the nooks and corns. Whitby shops are full of jet ornaments—brooches, beads, bracelets, and a thousand and one fanciful things—for jet is mined near the town,—a smooth lustrous substance whose name has come to signify the final degree of blackness.
On the following day we again wander about the old-world streets of the town, which we find ourselves loath to leave. The morning’s catch is just in at the fish-market and the finny tribes of all degrees are sorted on the pavement and sold to the townspeople. The fishing industry of Whitby is now on a small scale only; in former days it constituted a source of some wealth. The ballad writer celebrating Robin Hood’s visit to Whitby gives this very good reason:
“The fishermen more money have
Than any merchants two or three.”
And thus the sturdy highwayman found it easy to replenish his exchequer from the fat purses of Whitby folk. It may be, though, that the isolated situation of the town between the wild moors and the sea, and its good harbor for small vessels, made the occupation of smuggling especially profitable, and the wealth of the old-time citizens of Whitby may have been augmented by this practice.
IN OLD WHITBY.
From Original Painting by R. E. Morrison, Royal Cambrian Academy, 1908.
Our route out of the town led through the Cleveland Hills, the roughest and loneliest of the Yorkshire moors. We climbed many steep, rugged hills and dropped down sharp, dangerous slopes; one will hardly find elsewhere in England a country scored more deeply by narrow valleys. There is little of life on the twenty-five miles of road to Guisborough, where one comes out of the moor into the wide valley of the Tees. Guisborough is a bleak little town whose beautiful surroundings have been marred by the mines. Of its ancient priory, there remains only the magnificent eastern wall, pierced nearly to the top by tall lancet windows from which the stone tracery has long since vanished. It stands in a wide meadow, half hidden by giant trees. As we glided along the highroad we caught glimpses of the wall, rising from a stretch of velvety lawn, but there was not enough of the ruin to make a nearer inspection worth while.
From Guisborough our road ran through a level, fertile farming country. We missed Middlesbrough, a manufacturing city of one hundred thousand, whose array of factory chimneys loomed up thickly across the fields, and soon came into Stockton-on-Tees, about half the size of its neighbor. It lies directly on the river, here a black, turbid stream, sullied by the factories that crowd its banks. We hesitated entering the Black Lion—it had an uncanny look that made us distrust even the infallible Baedeker. No one except the busy barmaids was to be seen. A few glances about the place confirmed our suspicions and we “silently stole away.”
What a contrast to the Black Lion we found in its next-door neighbor, the Vane Arms, a fine type of the hospitable old-time English inn. Its massive, richly carved furniture would delight the heart of the connoisseur and is the pride of the stately landlady, who sat at the head of the table and treated us as though we were guests in more than the perfunctory hotel parlance. In the desert of daily hotel life one does not easily forget such an oasis as the Vane Arms. It is the only thing I can think of that might make one wish to linger in Stockton-on-Tees.