in the place; nothing but a sequestered village, which could not boast of
church or chapel, and which had only one small shop. My parents used to
hire a charming little cottage belonging to the village blacksmith. Its
front opened upon the village street, and behind was a garden, full of
the simple cottage flowers which are so strangely unfamiliar to those
doomed to dwell in towns. A summer-house, clothed in honeysuckle, was one
of the features of the garden, and the delicious scent seemed to me in
those happy days, when I first reached the cottage on one of our summer
holidays, to be as it were the fragrance of heaven itself. Nobody else
seemed to visit Whitley in those first years of our sojourn there; so
that we had the noble stretch of sands and the long line of cliffs almost
to ourselves during the long summer's day, and my father, lying on the
yielding turf above the sands, could study his sermon for the coming
Sunday at peace, unmolested and almost unseen by any man. There must
still, I suppose, be spots somewhere on the long coastline of this island
where one might find combined the peace, the seclusion, and the beauty of
that bit of Northumberland as I knew it fifty years ago; and yet,
whatever my understanding may say, my heart tells me that I shall never
again see anything like the Whitley of my youth. [Footnote: Since these
pages were penned, the memory of the blacksmith's cottage at Whitley has
been vividly brought back to me under rather singular circumstances. In
the spring of 1895 I was dining in Downing Street with Lord Rosebery,
then Prime Minister. Next to me at dinner was seated Sir James Joicey,
the millionaire colliery owner and Member of Parliament. Sir James is,
like myself, a Northumbrian, and our conversation naturally turned upon
our native county. I spoke of the blacksmith's cottage, and the bower of
honeysuckle at Whitley, with the enthusiasm which old memories evoked. To
my surprise, there was an answering gleam of pleasure and tenderness on
my friend's face. "_You_ lived in the blacksmith's cottage?" said
he. "Why, so did we when I was a boy!" We found, on comparing dates, that