mt eee = 
ee ae 
27 
a thing when it is made! On the other hand it is a people by no 
means wanting in good moral qualities. Like the millstone rock 
of its own hills, it abounds in grit. Sturdily independent, it has 
a healthy horror of being ‘ thrown upon the parish.” It is a 
people that will pass through the hardest times with a cheerful- 
ness and a self-abnegation worthy of the best traditions of the 
Stoics. It is a people that, even when at the last extremity, 
will grin and abide rather than whine and groan. And when 
the sun shines out again and there is wherewithal, it is a people 
that bakes its own bread and brews its own beer, and does not 
dislike the taste of it, or even the taste of its neighbour’s. (Until 
within a few years the practice of ‘‘home-brewing ”’ was here 
universal : and the practice of ‘‘ home-baking ”’ still prevails, nor 
is any more delicious wheaten bread to be tasted anywhere than 
the ‘‘ home-baked” of your housewife of the Lancashire border.) 
It is a people with a stiffish neck, it is also a people with 
“backbone,” and certainly no rickety fellow is ever likely to fare 
particularly well at its hands, or to get the better of it. It is a 
people that one might love as rare Charles Kingsley loved 
Kurus! It is a people for bracing, strengthening, and kicking 
clean out of you all the ‘‘mewling and puking”’ business. I 
have known it drive men from the country by simply labelling 
them—by affixing to them, with its keen, caustic mother-wit, 
some nickname, based perhaps on some pestilent bit of 
coxcombry on their part, no doubt deserved, and which has 
clung to them and clung to them like a cloak of Nessus, till they 
could bear it no longer. 
I remarked upon the admirable patience of this people in 
circumstances of hardship. Let me illustrate. In one of those 
severe commercial crises through which this district, with its 
valley-populations mainly employed in the cotton trade, has 
passed of late years, and which have brought hundreds of 
respectable families to the verge of starvation, a certain 
Tommy ——-— was observed to carry a tablespoon about with 
him wherever he went. On being questioned why he always 
carried a ‘“‘ spooin’”’ in his pocket, Tommy laughingly explained, 
““Theaw sees it’s this way: wheniver eawr owld woman calls 
out ‘ Porridge!’ if aw’ve a spooin to seek, aw’m done!” Surely 
this cheerful spirit, surely this abounding good humour, in face 
of the possibility of missing one’s sole bite for the day (for in 
these times people fasted even longer) is worthy of Epictetus 
himself. 
With an appreciable touch of the Celtic, and a more consider- 
able element of the Scandinavian (Danish), the type on these 
hills, as previously hinted, is in the main Saxon (Anglian), and 
in the character of the people, as also previously hinted, there is 
much of the Saxon shrewdness, though curiously blended with a 
