1 The little river, the Esk, runs through a deep valley, which broadens out as it comes near the harbour.
2 In the soft light the distant hills became melted, and the shadows in the valleys and gorges of velvety blackness.
3 Something made me start up, a low, piteous howling of dogs somewhere far below in the valley, which was hidden from my sight.
4 There seemed a strange stillness over everything; but as I listened I heard as if from down below in the valley the howling of many wolves.
5 The valley is beautifully green, and it is so steep that when you are on the high land on either side you look right across it, unless you are near enough to see down.
6 I see the lights scattered all over the town, sometimes in rows where the streets are, and sometimes singly; they run right up the Esk and die away in the curve of the valley.
7 To the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and crannies of the stone.
8 As the evening fell it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of late-lying snow.