Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/376



AVING occupied so much space with walks in the semicircle embracing the Black Country, and based upon a line drawn through Birmingham from Bromsgrove to Walsall, but little room remains for a notice of those interesting towns and sceneries lying eastward of equal radius. These would supply abundant and varied material for an independent volume, but I must condense within a few pages what should occupy five hundred.

In the course of last summer I was, for the first time, one of the invited guests of an English nobleman, residing in North Staffordshire. And it being the first time, I felt myself fortunate in sharing the generous and easy hospitalities of a host who was as good a specimen of "a fine old English gentleman" as England could produce.