54 



It has occurred to me that I could, perhaps, best perform 

 the task which I have in hand by drawing somewhat upon my 

 personal recollections of Canon Atkinson, and by incorporating 

 material contained in letters which at one time or another I 

 received from him. 



I first made his acquaintance in the spring or early summer 

 of 1880, when I had recently come into Cleveland, and when, 

 though living nine miles away, he walked across the moors to 

 call on me. An upright, good-looking man, with intelligent 

 eye, pleasant voice, and hair growing grey, he sat on the edge of 

 a chair, as though not in the slightest degree tired, and dis- 

 coursed very affably. In the following autumn I accepted his 

 invitation to the Danby Harvest Home, where I saw him in the 

 midst of a people who evidently thought much of their vicar. 

 Perhaps the most interesting visit I ever paid to him at Danby 

 was in April, 1884, when I took with me my friend the late 

 Kev. R. E. Hooppell. LL.D., D.C.L., Rector of Byers Green. 

 Atkinson was then about to be married for the third time, 

 and the vicarage was in the hands of workpeople, so that it was 

 with difficulty that the three of us could find sitting accommo- 

 dation in the study in which the furniture properly belonging 

 to sundry other rooms was piled up. Hooppell had a reputation 

 as an antiquary, but the conversation turned principally on 

 local antiquities, and Atkinson, being on his own ground, rather 

 mercilessly snubbed Hooppell when he ventured to express an 

 opinion different from his own, and turned his conversation to 

 me as though I knew more of such matters than my companion. 

 Still he was particularly kind to us both, and gave us luncheon, 

 and afterwards walked to the station with us. His wide and 

 accurate knowledge of local things gave to his conversation a 

 peculiar zest in the estimation of one interested in the neigh- 

 bourhood, and he was fond of telling strangers stories of the 

 Cleveland he first knew, and the old legends of the locality. 

 I think it was on the occasion of the visit I have just mentioned, 

 when he had been telling us some of these old-world stories, 

 that I asked him whether he had ever published any account of 

 the matters of which he had been discoursing to us, and on 

 receiving an answer in the negative, I suggested that he certainly 

 ought to see that his knowledge of them was preserved in some 

 permanent form. Later the influence of others led to this 

 being done by the publication of that most popular of his books 

 " Forty Years in a Moorland Parish." 



The last time I visited him was on the occasion of his 

 ^'Jubilee" in 1897. He had then been fifty years Vicar of Danby, 



