morrow, and he said, with a careless air, that that depended upon circumstances. If he found the inn comfortable he might stay a day or two so as to give his horse a thorough rest. That part of the world was new to him, he said, and it would interest him to see something of the country.

"The gentleman ought to go to the flowering of Ferneby Marl-pit oughtn't he, Mester Luke?" said Jim, pausing in the midst of the hissing and swishing with which he was accompanying the rubbing down of Star. "Twill be a gradely sight-the like hasn't been seen these twenty years, they say. The folks is comin' fro' far and near, an' they'll keep up the dancin' as long as there's a lass or lad to foot it."

"Pooh, Jim!" returned I, "the gentleman wouldn't care for country sports. "Twould give you little pleasure, Sir, I fancy," I went on, turning to him, "to see a lot of country folks jigging around a marl-pit, however well-flowered it might be."

"Nay," said he, "I think it would interest me. I have never heard of such a custom. Pray, what is a marl-pit, and what is this talk of flowering it?" "Eh, dear, you mun be simple!" broke in Jim, with rude amusement. "What's a marl-pit?' says he. Why, 'tis a big hole as they gets marl from for dressin' the fields."

"The land in these parts," explained I, "is somewhat light and sandy, and is much improved by marl being spread over it, particularly where woods have formerly grown. It is the custom when the work has been carried out to hold sports in and about the pits whence the marl was taken, principally for the reward and recreation of the folks employed in the business, and of the neighboring tenantry. This pit of Sir Jocelyn Gillibrand's is a particularly large one, and he has employed a many workmen, so that

the rejoicings are to be on a great scale, for 'tis to be May Day and the Flowering in one. As a rule we flower the pits and wells and such-like on St. John's Day, but Sir Jocelyn has a fancy for keepin' the two feasts tomorrow. They are to have a Maypole and Morris Dancers and such-like; and the Marling-folk are to walk in procession, carrying garlands, and there is to be a great wreath of flowers all round the pit, and there is to be a feast for the common folk, and I don't know what all."

"Merry doings indeed!" quoth he. "I have a mind to go and look at them, if one may do so without an invitation. I have not, unfortunately, the honor of Sir Jocelyn Gillibrand's acquaintance."

"Bless ye, Sir," cried Jim, before I could answer; "ye needn't wait to be lathed to go to a Marling Feast. The whole countryside 'ull turn out, I'll uphold you, and not one man in fifty will ha' been bid to it. I'm going mysel'," said Jim, conclusively, "if the Gaffer 'ull gie me a day off."

"That settles the question, surely," remarked the stranger, with a twinkle in his eyes.

He had blue eyes, but dark brows, which looked strange by contrast with the color of his skin and of his hair. He turned to me next:

"While your horse is being saddled, Sir," said he, "will you do me the honor to drink with me?"

"With all my heart," said I, much flattered by his tone, and we went together to a private room in the inn, where the gentleman ordered a bottle of claret. Poor sour stuff, enough, I thought it, and would have preferred a good tankard of the ale for which the Crown was famous, but I was loth to display my uncultivated taste to this very fine gentleman, and therefore lifted my glass with my head on one side and one eye closed, as I had

oftentimes seen fashionable travellers do when they sipped their liquor in token of extreme satisfaction.

"We must have a toast," said the Stranger; and then he looked me full in the eyes and continued, "I drink to Her!"

"Hear! Hear!" said I, "to Her by all means." And I set my lips to the glass.

"Wait a bit," cried he, throwing out his hand, "let us be agreed on this point. Whose health do you propose to drink, Sir?"

"Why-Hers, I suppose," stammered I. The lady you have in your mind."

"And have you no lady in your mind?" inquired he. And then he laughed and threw himself back in his chair. "Why what a simpleton I am to talk thus! Whom should an honest young yeoman have in his mind but some rosy-cheeked Queen of the dairy or such-like? Come, let us drink the health of your Sukey or Betty or whatever her name may be."

"I give you Dorothy, then," cried I, nettled by his manner, which had suddenly altered.

"Dorothy!" he exclaimed, springing up from his chair. "Dorothy! An unusual name in these parts surely."

"Oh, aye," said I, "uncommon enough."

He dropped back again into his former position, gazing at me through half-shut eyes.

"Let us drink to Dorothy!" said he, toying with his glass, and, after a moment, taking it up and bowing towards me. "Mrs. Dorothy, pretty Mrs. Dorothy-Shall we not give her her full title?-there may be a thousand Dorothys scattered over the world, but we must drink to one. Come, what is her surname? There can be no indiscretion in telling me, a perfect stranger, who will never set eyes on the lady, and who in all prob

ability will never exchange a word with yourself again."

But I shook my head with a sage air. "I cannot gratify you, Sir," said I. "I don't think the names of women should be bandied about. Now let us drink the health, if you please, for I must be gone."

He swallowed the contents of his glass with a listless air and would have refilled mine, but that I begged him to excuse me. He permitted me to take leave of him, and accompanied me to the door, where he was kind enough to bestow some words of admiration on Chestnut. I rode away feeling oddly attracted and interested by the personality of my new acquaintance, which I had gladly prosecuted further; though his air and manner denoted that he was considerably above me in station, he had been good enough to treat me almost as an equal, and I had fain seen more of him. Yet something in the tone in which he bade me farewell warned me that even were he to be a spectator of the sports on the morrow he had no wish to renew our intercourse.

Immediately after breakfast next morning I went to fetch Mrs. Dorothy. taking the precaution to place a pillion on Chestnut to save her the extra two miles' walk between Lychgate and the Delf; for she had informed my Mother she meant to proceed to the Flowering, like the rest of us, ou foot.

I suppose in spite of her scorn of our rustic merry-making she felt, nevertheless, some small measure of excitement, for I VOW she never looked so bonny. She wore a gray taffety mantua and quilted satin petticoat, and instead of a hat a cap trimmed with some wonderful fine lace. It sat well on her dark hair, and the soft light color of her coat suited her to admiration. I wore my best blue suit, too, I mind, and had a posy

in my coat, and another in my hat, and as we rode away together from Lychgate I saw one or two men that were at work in the neighboring field nudge each other, and I knew they thought us a bonny couple.

My Mother and Father stood awaiting us in our own yard, with Patty and Johnny, all ready to set forth and all mighty fine for the occasion-Patty wore abundance of blue ribbons and a posy of forget-me-nots. There was naught but blue and white about her, indeed, if one may except brown curls and red lips, for I am sure her eyes looked as blue as her own forget-menots that day.

Dismounting, and assisting Mrs. Dorothy to alight, I tossed my reins with a lordly air to Stumpy, and bade him look to my beast; and he led away Chestnut, grumbling that a body would think nobody wanted to go a-pleasuring but themselves for he, too, was in haste to get to the feast.

he

We set out in two parties of three, my Father and Mother, as usual, leading Johnny by the hand, and what a shrill din of happiness did the little lad keep up, to be sure, all the way! That tongue of his wagged ceaselessly, and now and then would break from his parents and run a little way ahead, and then, just as they had got into quiet converse with each other, returned to them, seizing with either hand one of theirs and interrupting their talk with his prattle.

I would fain have given an arm to both Dorothy and Patty, but the little wench said impudently that she preferred to walk by Dorothy's side, and I protest she behaved nigh as foolishly as Johnny, who, to be sure, was but a child, and could not be expected to have great store of good sense; there was no such excuse for Patty, and when she interrupted my dis

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course with Mrs. Dorothy with some babble about the birds, or the sky, or the green trees, or else with senseless merriment, I confess she angered me. For after all, as I pointed out to her, there was nothing marvellous about the singing of the birds, and 'twas not at all strange that the sky should be blue and the leaves green since that was the first of May, when such things were to be expected; and that she should laugh for pure gladness of heart was all very well, but then she should have fallen behind and laughed by herself, instead of interrupting other folks' conversation. But to this

day Patty will never own that I was justly aggrieved, for, she says, I was as cross myself as a bear with a sore head.

As soon as we turned into the road we met numbers of people coming from all parts it seemed, and hastening in the same direction as ourselves. Many had come from a distance in wagons or carts; some rode a-horseback with their wives or daughters behind them, but for the most part they came on foot, and would presently dance none the less merrily for having already trudged several miles. Faces were hot and shoes dusty, but all were merry. A good few, as I have already said, had come more than a day's journey and lain for the night at the Nag's Head; these were fresh and cool enough, and jeered at others of their kinsfolk and neighbors who had travelled nearly as far but had been on the road since daybreak or even earlier.

As we neared the great Marl-pit, which was pleasantly situated in a field well sheltered at the further end by a wood, the sound of music fell upon our ears. The piper was already playing to the folks while they were waiting for the procession to arrive.

The year 1903 saw the completion of an enterprise which in most years, when men were not too busy thinking of other things, would surely have attracted more attention than it has. A fresh record has been made. A railway refreshment room, and a very good one moreover, is to be found further north of the Arctic Circle than it has ever been found before. And an age which lives on records, and which can console itself for the unparalleled discomfort of the past rainy season by the reflection that no one living has ever been quite so wet and miserable before, owes it to itself to take an interest in the Arctic Railway. In the July of last year, King Oscar of Sweden formally opened for passenger traffic-it had been informally opened so far back as November 1902-the portion of the line which runs from Gellivara, in Swedish Lapland, across the divide to its terminus at Narvik in Norway, on the Ofoten Fjord. The line from Gellivara downwards to Lulea, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, had been working since 1887, and the Great Northern line from Stockholm up the Bothnian coast had been completed piece by piece, till it reached the Gellivara branch at Boden. The ingenious traveller who prefers land to water can now contrive to reach these Arctic regions with no more serious sea passage-there is one which is longer, but in smooth water, from Kiel to Korsoerthan the Dover to Calais crossing.

The Arctic region, however, through which this railway passes, I must cantion the tourist who is in search of something exciting, is by no means the inhospitable ice-clad affair which it sounds.

The truth is, that in Europe

the Arctic Circle is a little bit of a fraud. Except in winter, the districts of Sweden and Norway are, though somewhat rugged and infertile, especially in the high fjeld, anything but icy. The man who wants ice and snow in any quantity in summer will have to make troublesome journeys to get to it, and he will find a great deal more of it, and more easily, in Switzerland, the Tyrol, or Spain. And the making of this railway, though very interesting, is not the achievement which a similar undertaking would be in Asia or America. It is rather on account of its commercial importance, and as I venture to think and shall presently try to show, because of its possible future bearing on the political map of Europe, that the Arctic Railway will hereafter take its place among the interesting highways of the world.

The line owes its existence in the first instance to the presence of deposits of iron ore, in the eastern portion of Swedish Lapland, of extraordinary richness. Without becoming too statistical, I may mention that the "Malmberg" or ore mountain of Gellivara yields annually something like a million tons of iron ore which contains sixty to seventy per cent. of pure metal. Richer still is the deposit of Luossovaara at Kiiruna, where the ore is quarried direct from a hill over 3,000 feet high, and is even of better quality than that of Gellivara. The quantity of ironstone in this hill has been estimated at nearly 250,000,000 tons, and now that the line is open to the sea it is proposed to make this mountain disappear at the rate of 1,500,000 tons a year. If this takes place, the world will be presented in

150 years with a demonstration of the the kind which it can best appreciate, that capital, if not faith, can remove mountains.

A great deal might be written of the history of the line since its commencement, and a great many statistics might be added, which, however, my readers may prefer to take as read. It may be enough to say that the original line from Gellivara to Lulea was built by an English company between the years 1884 and 1887, and out of their ill-starred intermittent records one may quote one interesting fact as going to prove that the engineering difficulties were by no means seriousnamely, that in the summer of 1886, below Gellivara, the line was built and the rails were laid at the astonishing rate of one kilometre each working day. You may count the hours, of course, of a working day in full summer at eighteen to twenty-two. That same English company-who, by the way, had succeeded to an irregular service of reindeer sledges and ponies -went the way of many companies, and for a time all work ceased on the promised line. But in 1896 the Swedish Government commenced operations with a will. The line was carried northwards to Kiiruna and thence to the southern shores of Lake Torné, and thence in a westerly direction to the Norwegian Sea.

The scenery through which this northern line from Boden to Narvik passes is, it must be frankly owned, somewhat disappointing. It is the duty of the engineer to select the line of least resistance, and very admirably has he done it: in this instance the said line leads naturally over the enormous "Myr" peat-moors and mosses which abound everywhere along the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia. These are commonly united, or separated, by vast tracts of forest land, and here again the line, naturally, skirts the

low-lying and less broken edges of the wood. There is no reason for challenging the finer features of Lapland scenery by attacking mountains which can easily be avoided. And the traveller who runs up the line with the idea that he will thereby see the true beauty of the country, or indeed learn the secrets of Lapland, will be seriously misled. He will not see nor learn half so much as if he should start from the Norwegian side, on any of the routes that lead across the divide to the Swedish side, and make his way thence on foot or by boat. The traveller by rail, will, in fact, be surprised to find how very little the Arctic portion of his route differs from anything which he has seen in his upward journey from Stockholm, except. of course, that habitable spots are few and far between, and farming land such as he has seen in the south wholly wanting. Otherwise the general character of forest and moorland is monotonously similar, merely becoming more poverty-stricken as one advances to the Polar Circle. The finest part of the scenery of Inner Lapland lies nearly all the time far away to the east, and is visible only here and there in faint blue masses, with an occasional cap of pure white snow above it, as the train passes through the gap made in the landscape by one of the many rivers which the line has to cross. The finest part of the journey begins after the train has left Kiiruna, and makes the bend westwards along the southern shore of Lake Torné. This is a really beautiful bit of travelling, especially in September, when the dwarf birch and krokeboer have turned crimson and russet and gold, carpeting the whole sweep of the great desolate moorlands, till they meet the deep blue of the faroff mountains. The finest spot on the line is perhaps the Gorge of Abisko, at no great distance from the frontier.