“A dismal day, with occasional showers, prevented our seeing Sheffield to advantage.  On the whole, however, it is more cheerful and has more of a country-town look than Leeds—­a place utterly without beauty of aspect.  At Leeds you have vast barrack-like factories, with their usual suburbs of squalid rows of brick cottages, and everywhere the tall spiracles of the steam, which seems the pervading power of the place.  Everything there is machinery—­the machine is the intelligent agent, it would seem, the man its slave, standing by to tend it and pick up a broken thread now and then.  At Sheffield ... you might go through most of the streets without knowing anything of the kind was going on.  And steam here, instead of being a ruler, is a drudge, turning a grindstone or rolling out a bar of steel, but all the accuracy and skill of hand is the Man’s.  And consequently there was, we thought, a healthier aspect about the men engaged.  None of the Rodgers remain who founded the firm in my father’s time.  I saw some pairs of his scissors in the show-room still kept under the name of Persian scissors."[35]

From Sheffield Yule and his friend proceeded to Boston, “where there is the most exquisite church tower I have ever seen,” and thence to Lincoln, Peterborough, and Ely, ending their tour at Cambridge, where Yule spent a few delightful days.

In the autumn the great Duke of Wellington died, and Yule witnessed the historic pageant of his funeral.  His furlough was now nearly expired, and early in December he again embarked for India, leaving his wife and only child, of a few weeks old, behind him.  Some verses dated “Christmas Day near the Equator,” show how much he felt the separation.

Shortly after his return to Bengal, Yule received orders to proceed to Aracan, and to examine and report upon the passes between Aracan and Burma, as also to improve communications and select suitable sites for fortified posts to hold the same.  These orders came to Yule quite unexpectedly late one Saturday evening, but he completed all preparations and started at daybreak on the following Monday, 24th Jan. 1853.

From Calcutta to Khyook Phyoo, Yule proceeded by steamer, and thence up the river in the Tickler gunboat to Krenggyuen.  “Our course lay through a wilderness of wooded islands (50 to 200 feet high) and bays, sailing when we could, anchoring when neither wind nor tide served ... slow progress up the river.  More and more like the creeks and lagoons of the Niger or a Guiana river rather than anything I looked for in India.  The densest tree jungle covers the shore down into the water.  For miles no sign of human habitation, but now and then at rare intervals one sees a patch of hillside rudely cleared, with the bare stems of the burnt trees still standing....  Sometimes, too, a dark tunnel-like creek runs back beneath the thick vault of jungle, and from it silently steals out a slim canoe, manned by two or three wild-looking Mugs or Kyens (people of the Hills), driving it rapidly along with their short paddles held vertically, exactly like those of the Red men on the American rivers.”