Here I had another involuntary walk, not put down in the programme of my expectations.  On inquiring the way to Fir Vale, a picturesque suburb where a friend resided, I was directed to a locality which, it was suggested, must be the one I meant, though it was called Fir View.  I followed the direction given for a considerable distance, when it was varied successively by persons of whom I occasionally inquired.  After ascending and descending a number of steep hills, I suddenly came down upon the town again from the south, having made a complete circuit of it; a performance that cost me about two hours of time and much unsatisfactory perspiration.  Fearing that a second attempt would be equally unsuccessful, I took the Leeds road, and left the Jericho at the first round.  Walked about nine miles to a furnace-lighted village called very appropriately Hoyland, or Highland, when anglicised from the Danish.  It commands truly a grand view of wooded hills and deep valleys dashed with the sheen of ripened grain.

The next day I passed through a good sample section of England’s wealth and industry.  Mansions and parks of the gentry, hill, valley, wheat-fields, meadows of the most vivid green; crops luxuriant in most picturesque alternations; in a word, the whole a vista of the richest agricultural scenery.  And yet out of the brightest and broadest fields of wheat, barley and oats, towered up the colliery chimneys in every direction, like good-natured and swarthy giants smoking their pipes complacently and “with comfortable breasts” in view of the goodly scene.  The golden grain grew thick and tall up to the very pit’s mouth.  In the sun-light above and gas-light below human industry was plying its differently-bitted implements.  There were men reaping and studding the pathway of their sickles through the field with thickly-planted sheaves.  But right under them, a hundred fathoms deep, subterranean farmers were at work, with black and sweaty brows, garnering the coal-harvest sown there before the Flood.  Sickle above and pick below were gathering simultaneously the layers of wealth that Nature had stored in her parlor and cellar for man.

I passed through Barnsley and Wakefield on this day’s walk,—­towns full of profitable industries and busy populations, and growing in both after the American impulse and expansion.  If the good “Vicar of Wakefield” of the olden time could revisit the scene of his earthly experience, and look upon the old church of his ministry as it now appears, renovated from bottom to the top of its grand and lofty spire, he would not be entrapped again so easily into assent to the Greek apothegm of the swindler.