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