196 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



navian name to another rivulet, breaks from the other side of 

 the hill about a mile away, and flows in a north-west direction 

 till it ultimately falls into the sea opposite Spurn Head. Both 

 rivulets flow by celebrated scenes in mediaeval history ; both 

 are equally renowned for trout. If we follow the course of the 

 latter, however, a sufficiently typical view of the Wold and its 

 villages will be obtained. On one side of a rough fallow field 

 is a sudden semi-circular break in the bank. Three slender 

 rivulets gush out of as many orifices in this chalky bank, almost 

 immediately uniting to form a limpid streamlet, and this at 

 once commences babbling and prattling, in child-like fashion, 

 over a few handfuls of gravel, and in a dozen yards or so is 

 again silent, feeling the impropriety, in this busy county, of 

 sparkling or lapsing into playfulness, and at once settling down 

 to the business of life. The natives know this cradle of the 

 beck as Adam's Head. For a field or two the still youthful 

 stream flows at its own wayward will ; a few sad wildflowers 

 only bloom beside it, the genius of farming here not tolerating 

 such gauds, else it might be the beginning of one of the happier 

 rivulets of the western shires. Ere long the sterner work of 

 life begins. Just as the boy of nine years, on the hill-side 

 above, is paid a few pence a day to shout to the marauding 

 rooks, so at Buttermilk Springs (where a few more streamlets 

 from the hill-side swell the slender thread of the main stream), 

 the poor little beck is caught, forced to flow through an iron 

 pipe, and actually compelled to work a hydraulic ram. Civi- 

 lisation has seized upon its victim. The cast-iron pipe, the 

 monotonous brick-work, the plunging ram in its subterranean 

 cave are painfully prosaic and bare. The east wind starves all 

 sestheticism out of the heart of nature in these exposed valleys. 

 No tender undergrowth of many-coloured mosses lovingly 

 softens the ugliness of these staring utilities; no ladyfern droops 

 her nodding fronds around the little springs ; no blechnum 

 nestles beneath the obtrusive pipe, oiadtantum depends from the 



