black mark would show itself, which, offering no resistance to my stick as I drew it across its surface, I could only imagine to be caused by a flood of ink poured upon the beach by some horrible squid.  My musings on whether sea-monsters did ever disport themselves on the shore under the cover of sufficiently dark nights would be broken into by discovering that I had plunged into a stream of undiscoverable dimensions, whose existence only revealed itself by the splash of my boots.  Retreating cautiously, I would take a run, and then a terrific leap into the darkness, sometimes finding myself on firm dry sand, and as frequently in the water.

I had decided that I should probably not reach Sandsend until daylight, when a red lamp near the railway-bridge shone out as a beacon, and I realized that I would soon be safe from the tentacles of sea-monsters.

When I awoke next morning, I dashed out on to the beach, and commenced to walk rapidly in the direction of Whitby, in the hope that the tide had left some of those black stains still showing.  I wanted, also, to examine some of the queer ridges I had so often stepped over, and some of the rivers I had leapt.  The rivers were there wide enough in places, but nothing in the way of a ridge or any signs of those inky patches could I discern.  Careful examination showed, however, that here and there the smooth shore was covered with sand of a rather reddish hue, quite unworthy of remark in daylight.  The foolishness of my apprehensions seems apparent, but nevertheless I urge everyone to choose a moonlit night and a companion of some sort for traversing these three miles after sunset.

The two little becks finding their outlet at East Row and Sandsend are lovely to-day; but their beauty must have been much more apparent before the North-Eastern Railway put their black lattice girder bridges across the mouth of each valley.  But now that familiarity with these bridges, which are of the same pattern across every wooded ravine up the coast-line to Redcar, has blunted my impressions, I can think of the picturesqueness of East Row without remembering the railway.  It was in this glen, where Lord Normanby’s lovely woods make a background for the pretty tiled cottages, the mill, and the old stone bridge, which make up East Row, that the Saxons chose a home for their god Thor. [Since this was written one or two new houses have been allowed to mar the simplicity of the valley.—­G.  H.] Here they built some rude form of temple, afterwards, it seems, converted into a hermitage.  This was how the spot obtained the name Thordisa, a name it retained down to 1620, when the requirements of workmen from the newly-started alum-works at Sandsend led to building operations by the side of the stream.  The cottages which arose became known afterwards as East Row.