The flying hours had been crowded with impressions, tragic, uncanny, pitiful, and we had yet, in going to the station, to run the gantlet of a tipsy town, for it was a holiday. We had found Clitheroe drinking, earlier in the afternoon, and now we found Whalley drunk. One unsteady individual, wagging his head from side to side and stretching out a pair of wavering arms, tried to bar my progress.
"Wh-where be g-goin'?" he asked.
"To the train," I answered curtly, dodging by.
He sat down on the wall and wept aloud.
"T-to the tr-train! Oh, the L-Lord bl-bless you! The g-good L-Lord bl-bless you all the w-way!"
And the last we saw and heard of him, he was still feebly shaking his hands after us and sobbing maudlin benedictions.
II. Cheshire
Drayton the poet once took it upon him to assure Cheshire that what was true of Lancashire was true also of her:
"Thy natural sister shee—and linkt unto thee so
That Lancashire along with Cheshire still doth goe."
From that great backbone of England, the Pennine Range, both these counties fall away to the west, but Cheshire quickly opens into the Shropshire plain. At the northeast it has its share in the treasures of the deep coal-field rent across by the Pennines, and here, too, are valuable beds of copper. In this section of the county cluster the silk towns, among them Macclesfield, the chief seat in England of this manufacture, and Congleton, whose character we will trust has grown more spiritual with time. For in 1617 one of the village wags tugged a bear into the pulpit at the hour of service, and it was a full twelvemonth before the church was reconsecrated and worship resumed. Indeed, the Congleton folk had such a liking for bear-baiting or bear-dancing, or whatever sport it was their town bear afforded them, that when a few years later this poor beast died, it is told that