The train stopped a minute or two, to allow the tickets to be taken, just before entering the Sheffield station, and thence I had a glimpse of the famous town of razors and penknives, enveloped in a cloud of its own diffusing.  My impressions of it are extremely vague and misty,—­or, rather, smoky:  for Sheffield seems to me smokier than Manchester, Liverpool, or Birmingham,—­smokier than all England besides, unless Newcastle be the exception.  It might have been Pluto’s own metropolis, shrouded in sulphurous vapor; and, indeed, our approach to it had been by the Valley of the Shadow of Death, through a tunnel three miles in length, quite traversing the breadth and depth of a mountainous hill.

After passing Sheffield, the scenery became softer, gentler, yet more picturesque.  At one point we saw what I believe to be the utmost northern verge of Sherwood Forest,—­not consisting, however, of thousand-year oaks, extant from Robin Hood’s days, but of young and thriving plantations, which will require a century or two of slow English growth to give them much breadth of shade.  Earl Fitzwilliam’s property lies in this neighborhood, and probably his castle was hidden among some soft depth of foliage not far off.  Farther onward the country grew quite level around us, whereby I judged that we must now be in Lincolnshire; and shortly after six o’clock we caught the first glimpse of the Cathedral towers, though they loomed scarcely huge enough for our preconceived idea of them.  But, as we drew nearer, the great edifice began to assert itself, making us acknowledge it to be larger than our receptivity could take in.

At the railway-station we found no cab, (it being an unknown vehicle in Lincoln,) but only an omnibus belonging to the Saracen’s Head, which the driver recommended as the best hotel in the city, and took us thither accordingly.  It received us hospitably, and looked comfortable enough; though, like the hotels of most old English towns, it had a musty fragrance of antiquity, such as I have smelt in a seldom-opened London church where the broad-aisle is paved with tombstones.  The house was of an ancient fashion, the entrance into its interior court-yard being through an arch, in the side of which is the door of the hotel.  There are long corridors, an intricate arrangement of passages, and an up-and-down meandering of staircases, amid which it would be no marvel to encounter some forgotten guest who had gone astray a hundred years ago, and was still seeking for his bed-room while the rest of his generation were in their graves.  There is no exaggerating the confusion of mind that seizes upon a stranger in the bewildering geography of a great old-fashioned English inn.