Doubtless he argued the labourer was worthy of his hire.
CLARKSON'S MONUMENT.
Abolition in the West Indian Islands followed, and then the Emancipation Act of 1833, liberating 800,000 slaves and placing the sum of twenty millions sterling, as compensation, into the pockets of Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow slave-owners. That sturdy beast of burden, the British taxpayer, of course paid for this expensive burst of sentiment. Clarkson, already an old man, and weary with his long labours, received the Freedom of the City of London in 1839, and died in his eighty-seventh year, in 1846.
Midway between the hamlets of High Cross and Collier's End, at the second of the two left-hand turnings sign-posted for "Rowney Abbey and the Mundens," is the other hamlet of Standon Green End—if the two cottages and one farmhouse in a by-lane may so be dignified. Some three hundred yards along this lane, in the centre of a meadow, stands the singular monument known in all the country round about as the "Balloon Stone," a rough block of sandstone, surrounded by an iron railing, placed here to record the alighting on this spot of the first balloon that ever ascended in England. Tradition still tells of the terror that seized the rustics when they saw "a summat" dropping out of the sky, and how they fled for their lives.
On lifting a hinged plate, the astonishing facts of this antique æronautical adventure may be found duly set out in an amusingly grandiloquent inscription, engraved on a bronze tablet let into the upper part of the stone—
"Let Posterity Know
And Knowing be Astonished
That
On the 15 Day of September 1784
Vincent Lunardi of Lucca in Tuscany
The first Aerial Traveller in Britain
Mounting from the Artillery Ground
in London
And
Traversing the Regions of the Air
For Two Hours and Fifteen Minutes,
In this Spot
Revisited the Earth.
On this Rude Monument
For Ages be Recorded
That Wondrous Enterprise
Successfully atchieved
By the Powers of Chemistry
And the Fortitude of Man
That Improvement in Science
Which
The Great Author of all Knowledge
Patronising by His Providence
The Invention of Mankind
Hath graciously permitted
To their Benefit
And
His own Eternal glory."
"This Plate
A facsimile of the Original
One was placed here
in the month of November
1875 by Arthur Giles
Puller of Youngsbury."
Collier's End is a wayside hamlet of a few timber-framed and plaster cottages, leading to Puckeridge, where the ways to Cambridge divide: one going by Buntingford, Royston, and Melbourn; the other by Braughing, Barkway, Barley, and Fowlmere, meeting again at Harston in another nineteen miles. Away to the left, between Collier's End and Puckeridge, is St Edmund's College, a Roman Catholic seminary.