Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/112

98 landscape, and their ornamental grounds form a pleasant feature. Edgbaston especially is full of these elegant houses and gardens; but nearly all of them are built upon the pan of a lease-trap, which, one of these years, will spring up and catch every one of them, with all their lawns and external embellishments. The evening scenery enjoyed by these suburbs is very unique and even grand. Although the sky is slightly dashed with smoke in the best days. The Black Country reveals itself only at night, and then in its own aurora borealis. As the sun descends in the west it hangs the horizon with curtains of its own crimsoning. Its red twilight softens first into gold, then into pearl, and melts out of the evening sky; then comes the after-glow of the region of fire and smoke. Then upsprings the aurora borealis of The Black Country—the light of a hundred furnaces and forges roaring all through the night. It runs up and down the horizon like summer lightning, crimsoning the edges of the clouds, and the patches of sky between. This light is the halo around the brow of swart and patient Labour—that knows no rest while wealth is dreaming in its sleep.