Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/197

Rh delighted at this transition. It was the change of a minute's work by rail on leaving Wolverhampton. We were right in the midst of a highly-cultivated, picturesque country where Nature was in her holiday dress. There was a peep which would have photographed capitally and have made a beautiful picture. It was a straight and even piece of canal running between an avenue of tall and graceful trees a third of a mile in length. The sun in all its mild glory was looking up through this beautiful avenue, and turned the water between as we crossed it, to a long, silver-faced mirror, in which all the trees were looking at their faces, as if doing up their toilet for one of Nature's joy days. It was but a moment's glimpse, but long enough for the mind to photograph it vividly on the memory. We passed through a narrow belt or rather zone of this pleasant land, when we suddenly dashed into another Black Country—or that of Shropshire. A few miles beyond the antique, picturesque little town of Shiffnal we plunged into the sierra negra of Oaken Gates. They might have been oaken in the time of the Druids, but now they may well be taken for the iron gates of some subterranean or Plutonian region. Here are successive ranges of blue-black hills, looking like huge barrows, which have been windlassed up from unknown depths, leaving corresponding spaces in that