"What size was it?" the witness was asked when in the witness box giving evidence.
"It was about th' mickle of a piece of chalk," was the answer.[12]
[12] This is nearly as explicit as the description given by a person of the hailstones that fell during the thunder-storm. He said that they varied in size from a shilling to eighteen-pence.
In one of the hamlets lying beyond Todmorden, in the Burnley valley, there was a curious specimen of the Lancashire border character, Hiram Fielden, who kept a grocer's shop, and dealt also in the other commodities expected to be inquired for by a village community. In his younger days Hiram had been a cotton weaver in a mill, but his ambition was to save a little money, get married, and open a "Badger's Shop." By the exercise of great frugality, along with the help of the savings which his wife, Betty, brought him, he achieved his purpose.
He began business in a humble way at first; but gradually as his customers increased, his business grew, and instead of continuing to vend treacle from a two-gallon can, he at length ventured on giving an order for a whole hogshead at once! The arrival of this consignment created quite a sensation in the village; the like had never been seen there before, and the urchins who watched the process of unloading the precious cask, and saw it safely deposited end up in the corner of the store, smacked their lips as their imagination pictured the luscious reservoir of sweets. In the course of the day a further consignment—this time of whitewash brushes—arrived, and Betty, mounting a chair in the corner, and thence stepping on to the top of the treacle barrel, was just in the act of hanging the brushes on the hook in the ceiling, when the barrel end gave way underneath her, and down she settled gradually up to the arm-pits into the syrupy mass!
Hiram, who was busy at the back of the shop, hearing the crash, hurried in to ascertain the cause, and stood for a few moments gazing in consternation at the head of his better-half barely visible above the barrel edge. What was to be done? Ruin and disgrace and ridicule stared him in the face, but with great presence of mind he ran to the shop door, closed it, shot the bolt, and then drew down the window blind.
Mounting the barrel and securing a footing on its edge, he succeeded, by the help of a clothes-line which he looped on to the hook overhead, and which she stoutly grasped, in gradually extricating Betty from her savoury bath. Carefully he stroked the treacle from her as she rose ceilingwards, and, that no loss of merchandise might ensue, at the same time wiping her down with a cloth dipped in a bucket of water; thus all traces of Betty's misadventure were soon obliterated, and nobody but themselves was any the wiser.