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the harbour.  A great viaduct runs across, with high piers, through
which the view seems somehow further away than it really is.  The
valley is beautifully green, and it is so steep that when you are on
the high land on either side you look right across it, unless you are
near enough to see down.  The houses of the old town--the side away
from us, are all red-roofed, and seem piled up one over the other
anyhow, like the pictures we see of Nuremberg.  Right over the town is
the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is
the scene of part of "Marmion," where the girl was built up in the
wall.  It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful
and romantic bits.  There is a legend that a white lady is seen in one
of the windows.  Between it and the town there is another church, the
parish one, round which is a big graveyard, all full of tombstones.
This is to my mind the nicest spot in Whitby, for it lies right over
the town, and has a full view of the harbour and all up the bay to
where the headland called Kettleness stretches out into the sea.  It
descends so steeply over the harbour that part of the bank has fallen
away, and some of the graves have been destroyed.

In one place part of the stonework of the graves stretches out over
the sandy pathway far below.  There are walks, with seats beside them,

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widens.

It is nice at high water, but when the tide is out it shoals away to
nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk, running between
banks of sand, with rocks here and there.  Outside the harbour on this
side there rises for about half a mile a great reef, the sharp of
which runs straight out from behind the south lighthouse.  At the end
of it is a buoy with a bell, which swings in bad weather, and sends in
a mournful sound on the wind.

They have a legend here that when a ship is lost bells are heard out at
sea.  I must ask the old man about this.  He is coming this way . . .

He is a funny old man.  He must be awfully old, for his face is
gnarled and twisted like the bark of a tree.  He tells me that he is
nearly a hundred, and that he was a sailor in the Greenland fishing
fleet when Waterloo was fought.  He is, I am afraid, a very sceptical
person, for when I asked him about the bells at sea and the White Lady
at the abbey he said very brusquely,

"I wouldn't fash masel' about them, miss.  Them things be all wore

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out-argue them he bullies them, and then takes their silence for
agreement with his views.

Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock.  She has got
a beautiful colour since she has been here.

I noticed that the old men did not lose any time in coming and sitting
near her when we sat down.  She is so sweet with old people, I think
they all fell in love with her on the spot.  Even my old man succumbed
and did not contradict her, but gave me double share instead.  I got
him on the subject of the legends, and he went off at once into a sort
of sermon.  I must try to remember it and put it down.

"It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel, that's what it be and
nowt else.  These bans an' wafts an' boh-ghosts an' bar-guests an'
bogles an' all anent them is only fit to set bairns an' dizzy women
a'belderin'.  They be nowt but air-blebs.  They, an' all grims an' signs
an' warnin's, be all invented by parsons an' illsome berk-bodies an'
railway touters to skeer an' scunner hafflin's, an' to get folks to do
somethin' that they don't other incline to.  It makes me ireful to
think o' them.  Why, it's them that, not content with printin' lies on