212 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



cleanliness, and beauty to which a steam yacht can never lay 

 claim. In a golden age when such sublunar cares as letters, 

 telegrams, and business could not exist, without question a 

 sailing yacht would be infinitely preferable to steam ; but in 

 the present changeful scene, when time must be seriously taken 

 into consideration, and when it is absolutely necessary to be at 

 the office or the House on a certain day, commend us to a steam 

 yacht, and let it be of one hundred and thirty-four tons, with 

 ample saloon, state rooms, forecastle and the like, and a 

 glorious hurricane deck high above the smell of oil and vibra- 

 tion of the engines, commanding a large prospect on all 

 sides, and catching every wind that blows. For all these de- 

 sirable points, and many more perfections which the discerning 

 reader will take for granted, meet in the yacht of our heart, the 

 Firefly. Over to Spurn is some seven miles, but we left the 



" Humber loud that keeps the Scythian's name," 



and stretched out past light-ships and buoys (for the mouth of 

 the Humber is a network of shoals) to the open sea. Clee- 

 thorpes, the watering-place of Mid-England and Sheffield, is 

 passed, and the beacon of Donna Nook is seen on the right. 

 The shallow seas and long expanse of sand here are fatal to 

 many ships in winter. Numerous gate-posts and " briggs" in the 

 adjoining marsh-farms are mementoes of wrecks, and curious 

 legends of splendid port wine rescued from sunk vessels, and 

 coverlids of embroidery a couple of centuries old kept in the 

 farm-houses, float from mouth to mouth in this district. Just 

 beyond lies classic ground to the imaginative, Somercotes, the 

 scene of the Laureate's " Locksley Hall," with its barren sands 

 and waste, where rabbits and rooks live in amiable contiguity 

 in the same burrows. Trees are not to be expected on this 

 Meak cost. Every one will remember 



"The sandy tracts 

 And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts," 



