On our return to Leeds, our friend who accompanied us suggested that we spend the next day, Sunday, at Harrogate, fifteen miles to the north, one of the most famous of English watering places.  It had been drizzling fitfully all day, but as we started on the trip, it began to rain in earnest.  After picking our way carefully until free from the slippery streets in Leeds, we found the fine macadam road little affected by the deluge.  We were decidedly ahead of the season at Harrogate, and there were but few people at the splendid hotel where we stopped.

The following Sunday was as raw and nasty as English weather can be when it wants to, regardless of the time of year, and I did not take the car out of the hotel garage.  In the afternoon my friend and I walked to Knaresborough, one of the old Yorkshire towns about three miles distant.  I had never even heard of the place before, and it was a thorough surprise to me to find it one of the most ancient and interesting towns in the Kingdom.  Not a trace of modern improvement interfered with its old-world quaintness—­it looked as if it had been clinging undisturbed to the sharply rising hillside for centuries.  Just before entering the town, we followed up the valley of the River Nidd to the so-called “dripping well,” whose waters, heavily charged with limestone, drip from the cliffs above and “petrify” various objects in course of time by covering them with a stonelike surface.  Then we painfully ascended the hill—­not less than a forty-five per cent grade in motor parlance—­and wandered through the streets—­if such an assortment of narrow foot-paths, twisting around the corners, may be given the courtesy of the name—­until we came to the site of the castle.  The guide-book gives the usual epitaph for ruined castles, “Dismantled by orders of Cromwell’s Parliament,” and so well was this done that only one of the original eleven great watch-towers remains, and a small portion of the Norman keep, beneath which are the elaborate vaulted apartments where Becket’s murderers once hid.  No doubt the great difficulty the Cromwellians had in taking the castle seemed a good reason to them for effectually destroying it.  At one time it was in the possession of the notorious Piers Gaveston, and it was for a while the prison-house of King Henry II.  There are many other points of interest in Knaresborough, not forgetting the cave from which Mother Shipton issued her famous prophecies, in which she missed it only by bringing the world to an end ahead of schedule time.  But they deny in Knaresborough she ever made such a prediction, and prefer to rest her claims to infallibility on her prophecy illustrated on a post card by a highly colored motor car with the legend,

    “Carriages without horses shall go,
    And accidents fill the world with woe.”

Altogether, Knaresborough is a town little frequented by Americans, but none the less worthy of a visit.  Harrogate is an excellent center for this and many other places, if one is insistent on the very best and most stylish hotel accommodations that the island affords.  Ripon, with its cathedral and Fountains Abbey, perhaps the finest ruin in Great Britain, is only a dozen miles away; but we visited these on our return to London from the north.