[352] When the period for which an apprentice is bound (seven years) expires, his “loosing” is held by himself, and shopmates. Then are these steel bells made to jangle all day. At night the loosing is farther celebrated by a supper and booze. The parochial ringers frequently attend festivities with a set of hand-bells, which, in the estimation of their auditors, they make “discourse most eloquent music.”
[353] Asidew. The orthography of this word may be wrong. I never, to my knowledge, saw it written. It is used in Sheffield to express a thin, very thin brass leaf, of a high gold colour.
[354] In my boyish days, one Ludlam kept it. Was it he to whom belonged the dog which gave occasion to this proverbial saying? “As idle as Ludlam’s dog, that lay down to bark?”
[355] Abundant.
[356] Mr. Sharp’s Dissertation, p. 29.
September 27.
Chronology.
On the 27th of September, 1772, died at Turnhurst, in Staffordshire, James Brindley, a man celebrated for extraordinary mechanical genius and skilful labours in inland navigation. He was born at Tunsted, in the parish of Wormhill, Derbyshire, in 1716, where he contributed to support his parents’ family till he was nearly seventeen years of age, when he bound himself apprentice to a wheelwright named Bennet, near Macclesfield, in Cheshire. In the early period of his apprenticeship, he performed several parts of the business without instruction, and so satisfied the millers, that he was always consulted in preference to his master, and before the expiration of his servitude, when Mr. Bennet, by his age and infirmities, became unable to work, he carried on the business, and provided a comfortable subsistence for the old man and his family.
About this time Bennet was employed in constructing an engine paper-mill, the first of the kind that had been attempted in these parts; but, as he was likely to fail in the execution of it, Mr. Brindley, without communicating his design, set out on Saturday evening after the business of the day was finished, and having inspected the work, returned home on Monday morning, after a journey of fifty miles, informed his master of its defects, and completed the engine to the entire satisfaction of the proprietors. He afterwards engaged in the mill-wright business on his own account. The fame of his inventions in a little while spread far beyond his own neighbourhood. In 1752, he was employed to erect a curious water-engine at Clifton, in Lancashire, for the purpose of draining coal-mines, which had before been performed at an enormous expense. The water for the use of this engine was conveyed from the river Irwell by a subterraneous channel, nearly six hundred yards long, which passed through a rock; and the wheel was fixed thirty feet below the surface of the ground.