316

A SUMMER NIGHT

CH. XV

has any living man heard the baying of the gazehounds re-echo over moor or hollow where once the merry music used to float down the wind so often. The very art of archery is lost. The boys who used to learn so painfully the forest bounds were long since grandfathers, and not one urchin nowadays could say where the forest ended. Customs, habits, yes, the very language have all changed. Nothing is the same except the hill and the many coloured houses with their sloping gardens, and the brown moorland water sweeping round its base so swift and steady. It is evening, and a small feathery moon has risen over the treetops, casting a faint shimmer on the One or two lights are gleaming on the hillside, and a boat comes up against the stream with a brilliant Chinese lantern in its stern. There is a sound of voices on the water, boys playing in the empty boats as others must have played before them any time these ten centuries and more. Silence is dropping down on Knaresborough; and as I walk back through the empty streets to my hotel, the summer night is filled with infinite sweet odours and with little rustling sounds, as if some presence out of the old past were labouring to tell me something high and solemn, and yet was inarticulate.

I WISH I had not heeded old Sir Thomas Brown when he told me many chapters back that deliberating delay would be a wise cunctation. I was all too much inclined to loiter when the worthy knight pulled me by the sleeve; and encouraged by his sententious suggestions, I have let time slip and slouched along the hedgerows picking flowers as if I were no more bound to hasten than any vagrant gypsy, who may unyoke his pony by the roadside when he pleases, and cares not if he reach his journey's end that night or not.

Dear old philosopher, that attitude of mind may do for Norfolk, where the acreage is less, and the interest-if I may say it so far inferior. But here in Yorkshire he who loiters will pay the penalty by leaving many a place unseen which he

318

OTLEY

CHAP.

would fain have visited; and as I ride swiftly on from Knaresborough, past the unlovely outskirts of Harrogate, towards the opening of the long Wharfe Valley, I remember with a pang that I had meant to visit Adel, and Harewood, where that sturdy old Chief Justice Gascoigne, who feared neither king nor prince, lies sleeping in the church; and Farnley, with many another place which I have dreamt of seeing since my childhood, but now must go by, lest I leave out greater things. Perhaps it is as well; for who can carry in his mind every noble thing there is in Yorkshire, or store his memory with all its excellences without reducing the whole to one mixed blur?

Otley lies in the opening of Wharfedale, a wide and spacious gateway to the moors. Low hills, well wooded, flank it on the south, and on the north a few ridges of high ground far away across the fertile valley mark the entrance of that wide dale which narrows quickly to a beauty so exceeding. The town has little distinction, save in the noble wooded slopes which drop down from the Chevin and from "Jenny's Hill" to the very borders of the town,-a foretaste of the heights to which the valley bounds will rise when the gorge narrows and woods and pastures give place to the brown moor. There is no waste

XVI

THE WHARFE

319

land as yet upon the slopes; and through the wide green valley the river runs on placidly with an unbroken surface, yet swirling here and there in eddies which betray the power of the current. "In summer, too," says Camden, "it is very dangerous; as I experienced to my cost in my first tour in these parts." I wish the good man had not given only half his confidence; yet even as they stand, without the details, these few feeling words may serve to restrain the eagerness of any who might think it safe to dabble in the Wharfe.

So says an ancient saw. Indeed, I am very glad that Camden was not one of the number, and that he paid no heavy price for the lesson to mistrust the pretty swirling stream which washes up so pleasantly among the forget-me-nots and meadowsweet upon its banks.

As I follow up the valley, threading the fields over an atrocious road, the river begins now and then to show its teeth, the brown water flashes into white over a jagged rock, and an occasional waste of moorland on the left shows that I

320

ILKLEY

CHAP.

am drawing near the region of those downs where the monks of Bolton used to graze their herds of sheep and cattle. Presently a fine crag rises on the hilltop, a dark splintered cairn of stormworn rock. It is Ben Rhyddyng, and the turrets of the great Hydropathic are just below, almost at the beginning of the moor, which sweeps on brown and sombre from that point, roughened here and there by woodlands, till it is lost in thin blue haze.

The heart of every riverside town is undoubtedly its bridge; and it is to the old grey arches which span the river at this point that I turn my steps before all else in Ilkley. On this fine summer morning the river flows on brown and cool. It has gained already the aspect of a mountain stream, broad and shallow, singing over a bed of many coloured gravel which flashes in the sunlight, and among which one sees from time to time the slow moving body of a blunt-nosed trout. A little wind stealing off the moors shakes the shadows on the bank, just where the scyamores dip their lower branches in the stream; and a little higher up a few boulders make a freshet, and send down a scum of bubbles discolouring the clear water. On the further bank there lie wide meadows of lush grass all bronzed with buttercups and sorrell, and shaded by high hedges where the hawthorn is in blossom yet. Further off again there are wellwooded hills stretching far into the blue haze which wraps both moors and valley in a mystery not yet scattered by the sun.

Here upon the bridge, and in all the meadows round, there is no haze, but exquisite clear morning, with a mountain freshness in the air. It is early still. There is no bustle in the town; and here by the riverside, where the stone coping of the bridge is but just warmed by the sun still lingering near the hilltops, there are no noises but those made by the river and the birds. Just such a morning it must have been when William Butterfield, long ago, surprised a tribe of fairies at the wells a short way up the hillside. He remembered noticing particularly, as he went very early at midsummer to set open