Chorley, July 7.
Anderton Hall.
As we approached Anderton Hall the English and American flags were seen floating from the archway, earnest of cordial welcome. We were quite at home immediately. Mr. and Mrs. B—— had their family and friends ready to greet us. The dining-hall was decorated with the flags of the old and the new lands, gracefully intertwined, symbolizing the close and warm friendship which exists between them—never, we hope, to be again disturbed. We had a long walk about the place and on the banks of the famous Rivington Reservoir, which supplies Manchester with water. In the evening, after dinner, came speeches. The evening passed delightfully. Next day we were sorely tempted. Mr. M—— was to have the school-children at his house to be entertained, and an opportunity to see a novel celebration was afforded us. Our host and hostess were pressing in their invitation for us to stay, but one night of fourteen guests, two servants, and four horses, was surely enough; so we blew our horn, and, with three ringing cheers for Anderton Hall and all within it, drove out of its hospitable gates. We stopped and paid our respects to Mr. and Mrs. M—— as we passed their place, and left them all with very sincere regret. How pleasant it would be to linger! but Inverness lies far in the north. We are scarcely one-third of our way thither and the time-table stares us in the face. We do not quite "fold our tents like the Arabs and silently steal away," but at the thrilling call of the horn we mount, and with cheers and God-speeds take our departure for other scenes, but many a long day shall it be ere the faces of the kind people we leave behind fade from our memory.
Chorley has been one of the seats of the cotton manufacture in England for more than two hundred years, the business having been begun there about the time of the Restoration. During the American Revolution it was visited, like other places in Lancashire, by mobs who broke up the spinning machines because they feared that they would deprive the poor of labor. Similar mobs once destroyed sewing-machines in France. What a commentary upon such short-sightedness has been the success of the spinning-jenny and the sewing-machine, and the revolution they have made in the manufacturing industry of the world!
Preston, July 8.
Strolling Players.
Preston, sixteen miles away, is our destination, permitting a late start to be made. Our route is still through a manufacturing district; for Manchester reaches her arms far out in every direction. We pass now and then a company of show-people with their vans. Sometimes we find the caravan at rest, the old, weary-looking horses nibbling the road-side grass, for the irregularity of the hedges in England gives fine little plots of grass along the hedge-rows, and nice offsets, as it were, in the road, where these strolling players, and gypsies, pedlers, and itinerant venders of all sorts of queer things, can call a halt and enjoy themselves. Every van appears to be invested with an air of mystery, for was not our Shakespeare,
"Th' applause, delight, the wonder of our stage,"
a strolling player, playing his part in barns and outhouses to wondering rustics? There are such possibilities in every van that I greet the sweet little child as if she were a princess in disguise, and the dark-eyed, foreign-looking boy as if he might have within him the soul of Buddha. I do not believe that any other form of life has the attractions of this nomadic existence. To make it perfect one should put away enough in the funds as a reserve to be drawn upon when he could not make the pittance necessary to feed and clothe him and buy a few old copies of good books as he passed through a village. The rule might be, only when hungry shall this pocket-book be opened. I should have one other contingency in order to be perfectly happy—when I wanted to help a companion in distress. Elia was truly not very far from it when he said that if he were not the independent gentleman he was he would be a beggar. So, if I were not the independent gentleman I am, I would be a member of a strolling band, such as we often pass in this crowded land, and boast that Shakespeare was of our profession. What are the Charioteers, after all, in their happiest dream, but aristocratic gypsies? That is the reason we are so enraptured with the life.