My best companions now the driving winds,
And now the "trotting brooks" and whispering trees,
And now the music of my own sad steps,
With many a short-lived thought that passed between,
And disappeared.
Wordsworth.
A short walk from "Newcroft" brought me to a dip in the highway, at a spot where four roads meet in the hollow, a "four-lone-eends," as country folk call it. Such places had an awful interest for the simple hinds of Lancashire in old times; and, in remote parts of the county, the same feeling is strong yet with regard to them. In ancient days, robbers, and other malefactors, were sometimes buried at the ends of four cross roads, unhallowed by "bell, book, or candle." The old superstitions of the people, cherished by their manner of life, dwelling, as they did, in little seclusions, scattered over the country around, made these the meeting-places of witches, and all sorts of unholy things, of a weird nature. It is a common belief now, among the natives of the hills and solitary cloughs of Lancashire, that the best way of laying a ghost, or quieting any unearthly spirit whose restlessness troubles their lonely lives, is to sacrifice a cock to the goblin, and, with certain curious ceremonies, to bury the same deep in the earth at a "four-lone-eends," firmly pinned to the ground by a hedge-stake, driven through its body. The coldly-learned, "lost in a gloom of uninspired research," may sneer at these rustic superstitions; yet, surely, he was wiser who said that he would rather decline to the "traditionary sympathies of unlettered ignorance," than constantly see and hear
The repetitions wearisome of sense,
Where soul is dead, and feeling hath no place;
Where knowledge, ill begun in cold remark
On outward things, in formal inference ends
Near this place stands the handsome mansion of J. T. Hibbert, Esq., the president of the Mutual Improvement Society at Stretford, and a general benefactor to the neighbourhood in which he resides. He seems to have awakened that locality to the spirit of modern improvement, and is making what was, comparatively, a desert nook before, now gradually smile around him. The people thereabouts say that "it wur quite a lost place afore he coom." We are now in the township of Urmston, though not in the exact spot where "Tim Bobbin" was born. As I stood in the hollow, looking round at the little cluster of dwellings, my friend pointed to a large, sleepy-looking old brick house, with a slip of greensward peeping through the paling in front, as the dwelling of William Shore, Esq., an eminent local musician, the author of that beautiful glee-arrangement of the music to Burns's matchless carousal song, "Willie brewed a peck o' maut," so much admired by all lovers of the concord of sweet sounds. And, certainly, if the musician had never done anything more than that exquisite gem of harmony, it would have added an interest to his dwelling-place. Who, that loved music, could go by such a spot without noticing it? Not I; for, as Wordsworth says of the pedlar who sometimes accompanied him in his mountain rambles, so, partly, may I say—
Not a hamlet could we pass,
Rarely a house, that did not yield to him
Remembrances.