ABSTRACT
I am writing at a window commanding the crowded market place of a quaint old-fashioned town. The houses are irregular and massed together in picturesque clumps, their outline serrated by crazy chimney stacks and high peaked gables. Opposite to me is an old buttressed Norman church - a gilt crown placed loyally above the weathercock, and a gilt mitre placed religiously above the crown. The market place is built on top of a hill-for steep lanes slope down from it in all directions, and through their openings you catch pleasant glimpses of distant healthy hills. A majority of the crowded shops display in their windows richest silks of the gayest patterns - gown pieces, waistcoat pieces, and handkerchiefs of all hues and sizes. The market is crowded with stalls and booths and tents, and these ~re surrounded by chaffering customers. The wares displayed are here and there peculiar. Amid great heaps of vegetables and fruit, piled in pyramids upon the pavement, are the stalls of vendors and blacking - for here is manufactured the material which polishes the boots and shoes of a great part of Lancashire. One family make and sell near half a ton weekly. Close to the blacking merchant is a quack with his portable furnaces· and retorts, distilling his remedies before a gaping crowd of onlookers. Next to him sits, in his canvas-roofed tent, a bread merchant - home-baked wheaten loaves on one side of his shop, round, doughy cakes of oatmeal, sold at a penny apiece, piled up, on the other. Hard by is a 'stall filled with hares, rabbits, black game, and plovers, and just before it stands a man with a huge inverted umbrella, filled with coarsely made brown stays. The aspect of the people is on the whole comfortable and well-to-do. The vendors are generally country folks, burly farmers or knowing pedlars. The buyers are the people of the town, amongst whom the lower class of females appear decidedly better dressed and better looking than the factory women. Nevertheless, most of them do work in mills. A short tum through the old-fashioned town with its narrow streets and its ranges of stairs from one elevated plateau to another, will reveal many factories, similar in appearance to the cotton mills, but smaller in size, and crowne.d with chimneys, which though tall, are yet not so tall as most of those with which we have been lately dealing.
