On Monday the clouds cleared away and the whole country was gloriously bright and fresh after the heavy showers.  We returned to Leeds over the road by which we came to Harrogate and which passes Haredale Hall, one of the finest country places in the Kingdom.  A large portion of the way the road is bordered by fine forests, which form a great park around the mansion.  We passed through Leeds to the southward, having no desire to return to Manchester over the road by which we came, or, in fact, to pass through the city at all.  Our objective point for the evening was Chester, and this could be reached quite as easily by passing to the south of Manchester.  Wakefield, with its magnificent church, recently dignified as a cathedral, was the first town of consequence on our way, and about twenty-five miles south of Leeds we came to Barnsley, lying on the edge of the great moorlands in central England.  There is hardly a town in the whole Kingdom that does not have its peculiar tradition, and an English friend told us that the fame of Barnsley rests on the claim that no hotel in England can equal the mutton chops of the King’s Head—­a truly unique distinction in a land where the mutton chop is standard and the best in the world.

An English moor is a revelation to an American who has never crossed one and who may have a hazy notion of it from Tennyson’s verse or “Lorna Doone.”  Imagine, lying in the midst of fertile fields and populous cities, a large tract of brown, desolate and broken land, almost devoid of vegetation except gorse and heather, more comparable to the Arizona sagebrush country than anything else, and you have a fair idea of the “dreary, dreary moorland” of the poet.  For twenty miles from Barnsley our road ran through this great moor, and, except for two or three wretched-looking public houses—­one of them painfully misnamed “The Angel”—­there was not a single town or habitation along the road.  The moorland road began at Penistone, a desolate-looking little mining town straggling along a single street that dropped down a very sharp grade on leaving the town.  Despite the lonely desolation of the moor, the road was excellent, and followed the hills with gentle curves, generally avoiding steep grades.  So far as I can recall, we did not meet a single vehicle of any kind in the twenty miles of moorland road—­surely a paradise for the scorcher.  Coming out of the moor, we found ourselves within half a dozen miles of Manchester—­practically in its suburbs, for Stalybridge, Stockport, Altrincham and other large manufacturing towns are almost contiguous with the main city.  The streets of these towns were crowded with traffic and streetcar lines are numerous.  There is nothing of the slightest interest to the tourist, and after a belated luncheon at a really modern hotel in Stockport, we set out on the last forty miles of our journey.  After getting clear of Manchester and the surrounding towns, we came to the Chester road, one of the numberless “Watling