160 PRÆTERITA-I

limestone, would have been a gorge between nodding cliffs, with a pretty pattering stream at the bottom, but, in Jura, is a far retiring theatre of rising terraces, with bits of field and garden getting foot on them at various heights; a spiry convent in its hollow, and well-built little nests of husbandry-building set in corners of meadow, and on juts of rock;-no stream, to speak of, nor springs in it, nor the smallest conceivable reason for its being there, but that God made it.

“Far” retiring, I said,-perhaps a mile into the hills from the outer plain, by half a mile across, permitting the main road from Paris to Geneva to serpentine and zigzag capriciously up the cliff terraces with innocent engineering, finding itself every now and then where it had no notion of getting to, and looking, in a circumflex of puzzled level, where it was to go next;-retrospect of the plain of Burgundy enlarging under its backward sweeps, till at last, under a broken bit of steep final crag, it got quite up the side, and out over the edge of the ravine, where said ravine closes as unreasonably as it had opened, and the surprised traveller finds himself, magically as if he were Jack of the Beanstalk, in a new plain of an upper world. A world of level rock, breaking at the surface into yellow soil, capable of scanty, but healthy, turf, and sprinkled copse and thicket; with here and there, beyond, a blue surge of pines, and over those, if the evening or morning were clear, always one small bright silvery likeness of a cloud.

185. These first tracts of Jura differ in many pleasant ways from the limestone levels round Ingleborough, which are their English types. The Yorkshire moors are mostly by a hundred or two feet higher, and exposed to drift of rain under violent, nearly constant, wind. They break into wide fields of loose blocks, and rugged slopes of shale; and are mixed with sands and clay from the millstone grit, which nourish rank grass, and lodge in occasional morass: the wild winds also forbidding any vestige or comfort of

[Version 0.04: March 2008]