CLEAR WATERS 



we struck thence up the long valley road by High 

 Force, and so on to Cauldron Snout and High-Cup- 

 nick. I have through all my life recalled the first 

 glimpse of Teesdale from the high moors upon the 

 eastern side, and the opening lines of Scott's description 

 of it in Rokeby^ which poem people were familiar with 

 in those days, again and again come back to me : — 



Nor Tees alone in dawning bright 

 Shall rush upon the ravished sight, 

 But many a tributary stream 

 Each for its own dark glen shall gleam. 



For here just below you may see the trail of ' Silver 

 Lune from Stainmore Wild,' and further away the 

 line of the Greta, of notable name in those days 

 even for Philistines impervious to the magic wand of 

 the Wizard of the North. For one of the songs out of 

 Rokeby had been in high favour, and our aunts and 

 mothers, at any rate, had been wont to sing in drawing- 

 rooms of ' How Brignall woods were fresh and fair, 

 and Greta woods were green,' and how they ' would 

 rather rove with Edmund there than reign an English 

 queen.' 



We used to take our rods with us and fish a bit in 

 the Tees below Cauldron Snout, where it thunders 

 down a ridge two hundred feet high from its long, 

 strange, sluggish, meandering among the high bogs 

 known as the Weald. As Yorkshire, Durham, and 

 Westmoreland all meet at the foot of the falls, I must 

 after all, I suppose, have wetted a line in Yorkshire. 

 But I think our expeditions, particularly as they were 

 in July, were prompted as much by a love of fine wild 

 298 



