"How distrait you are to-night!" said
Veronica, with an assumption of tolerant
good humour.

Cesare Barletti took away in his brain
three themes on which his thoughts, passions,
and prejudices, made endless variations,
as he drove down the Avenue of the
Poggio Imperiale. The first was:—It is
odd that a man should not know or
remember who his wife's mother was! The
second was:—miladi wanted to make it
appear that Gale was speaking in
preoccupation or absence of mind; now Gale is
never "distrait," it is not in his character.
The third was:—That handsome creature
is not an Englishwoman, puro sangue! The
fact of her having had an Italian mother
brings her more into the category of human
beings whose manners and development
I understand. I wonder whether she
was offended with me because I did not
fall at her feet when we were in the garden
together, or, at least, make some preparations
for a future prostration of myself at
her shrine!

On this last theme the variations were
brilliant and inexhaustible.

AS THE CROW FLIES.

DUE NORTH. LEEDS TO YORK.

FROM the baldest and highest point of
Mickle Fell, the crown of Yorkshire, the
crow surveys the great county, half as large
as Holland, which he is about to traverse
on his swift way to his final roosting place
on the tower of Berwick-upon-Tweed. The
bird sees beneath him, small as toy houses,
those great monastic ruins of Rievaulx,
Fountains, Kirkstall, Bolton, and Jorevaulx;
while the castles of Knaresborough
and Pontefract, Skipton and York,
Richmond and Scarborough, wake up the
old bird's memory of the days of the
Cliffords and Mowbrays, the Lacys and
the Scropes, names that still make the
heart of a true Yorkshireman beat with a
warmer and a fuller pulse. The eastern
cliff-ramparts washed by the German Ocean,
the bracing moors and fells, the green and
laughing vales, the great manufacturing
cities, smoking like witches' caldrons, and
larded with spikes of factory chimneys, lie
before the crow, and threaten to tempt him
from the even tenor of his flight over those
fair rivers, the Humber, the Wharfe, the
Nid, and the Derwent, that stretch far
beneath his airy road their silver clues to the
labyrinth he has to traverse.

First descending through clouds of smoke
and steam, he alights on the black shore of
the Aire. He is in Leeds, paradise of
clothiers, murky Eden of woollen
manufacturers. The street and market talk is
of swansdowns and kerseymeres, and of
shoddy also. Half the wool of the West
Riding passes through the many thousand
busy and sinewy Yorkshire hands that force
wool into new and higher forms in the good
town of Leeds.

During the civil wars, when the Scropes
and the Fairfaxes were shouting their rival
battle cries, Leeds was nearly always
Parliamentarian. There had not been much
fighting on the banks of the Aire since, in
655, Penda, the hoary Pagan tyrant, who
in his time had slain three East Anglian
and two Northumbrian kings (such as
they were), at last fell in a great rout of
his Mercians on the shores of the overflowing
Aire, twenty of his vassal chieftains
perishing with him on the field or in the
flood. After many centuries the war fever
seethed up hotly once more in the veins of
the staunch men of the West Riding. In
January, 1643, Sir Thomas Fairfax, of
Denton, marched on the clothiers' town,
with six troops of horse, three companies of
dragoons, one thousand musketeers, and
two thousand club men from Bradford. Sir
William Saville, the Royalist commandant,
returning a haughty answer to the summons
to surrender, Sir Thomas drove straight
at the town with colours flying, beating the
garrison from their outworks and killing
their cannoniers. The storm lasted two
hours, at the end of which time Fairfax,
followed by Sir Henry Fowlis and Captain
Forbes, hewed his way into the town,
taking five hundred Cavalier prisoners and
two brass cannons, with good store of
ammunition. Sir William Saville fled, and got
safely across the Aire, but his sergeant-
major, Beaumont, was drowned in trying to
follow his leader. The Puritans only lost
twenty or thirty men in the short but hot
assault.

Briggate and Kirkgate both remained
tolerably quiet till 1647, when the Scotch
army having generously surrendered King
Charles, the rueful king passed through
Leeds a prisoner. It was on that occasion,
when Charles was lodged at Red Hall, that
John Harrison, the great Leeds merchant,
nobly came

              True as the dial to the sun,
              Although it be not shone upon,

and coaxing and forcing his way through
the sullen and morose musketeers, knelt,
and with bowed head, presented his majesty