"'Your land produces twice a year
Spices and fruits, you say,
But such as in my hand I bear.
Our land yields twice a day.'"
But the best songs of Cheshire go to the music of the river Dee. We have all had our moments of envying its heart-free Miller.
"There was a jolly Miller once
Lived on the river Dee;
He worked and sang from morn till night,
No lark more blithe than he;
And this the burden of his song
Forever used to be:
I care for nobody, no, not I,
And nobody cares for me."
Kingsley's tragic lyric of
"Mary, go and call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee,"
reports too truly the perils of that wide estuary where Lycidas was lost. On the corresponding estuary of the Mersey stands Birkenhead, the bustling modern port of Cheshire; but it was at Chester that Milton's college mate had embarked for another haven than the one he reached.
Chester itself is to many an American tourist the old-world city first seen and best remembered. Liverpool and Birkenhead are of to-day, but Chester, walled, turreted, with its arched gateways, its timber-and-plaster houses, its gables and lattices, its quaint Rows, its cathedral, is the mediæval made actual. The city abounds in memories of Romans, Britons, Saxons, of King Alfred who drove out the Danes, of King Edgar who, "toucht with imperious affection of glory," compelled six subject kings to row him up the Dee to St. John's Church, of King Charles who stood with the Mayor on the leads of the wall-tower now called by his name and beheld the defeat of the royal army on Rowton Moor. As we walked around the walls,—where, as everywhere in the county, the camera sought in vain for a Cheshire cat,—we talked of the brave old city's "strange, eventful history," but if it had been in the power of a wish to recall any one hour of all its past, I would have chosen mine out of some long-faded Whitsuntide, that I might see a Miracle pageant in its mediæval sincerity,—the tanners playing the tragedy of Lucifer's fall, perhaps, or the water-carriers the comedy of Noah's flood.
III. Staffordshire
This is the Black Country par excellence,—a county whose heraldic blazon should be the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. It belongs to the central plain of England, save on the northeast, where the lower end of the Pennine chain breaks into picturesque highlands. Its gently undulating reaches are still largely given over to agriculture, but the bulk of its population, the most of its energy and wealth, are concentrated in the manufacturing towns that so thickly stud the surface over its two coal-fields. The northern is the last of that long line of coal-measures running down from Lancashire; the southern is much larger, though not so workable, and extends across all South Staffordshire. Both north and south, iron in rich quantities is found with the coal, so that for many years Staffordshire controlled the iron trade of the world. Of late, South Wales and other regions are successfully disputing its supremacy.
We had, in previous visits to England, crossed Staffordshire several times by train, and memory retained an unattractive impression of netted railways, forests of factory chimneys, and grimy miners sweethearting with rough pitgirls under smoke and cinders. If we must enter it now, the occasion seemed propitious for a trial of the automobile,—a mode of conveyance which we had deemed too sacrilegious for the Border and the Lake Country.