rtlE PLEASURES OF RAMBLES. 
249 
the train at Lockwood, a stoppage which in those days could 
be done by a through passenger, such as I was alone. The 
cricket-match had been won, I learnt, by the prowess mainly 
of one player ; and by and by a big cricketer who was standing 
above me bent down, and pointing to a youth seated near me, 
whispered, behind his hand, “That’s Lockwood!” Being some- 
what confused between the cricketer and the place at which 
I was to stop the train, I sought an explanation, and learnt 
that the winning of the cricket-match had been largely due to 
Ephraim Lockwood, whose acquaintance I then made for the 
first time, and whose cricketing powers I afterwards witnessed 
on many a field. So the train was, at my request, stopped at 
Lockwood, where the carriage was eased of many cricketers, 
and we had room again. The behaviour of the people in this 
crush, as in many another crowd that I got among in the 
district, presented a marked superiority over what I afterwards 
found in the London crowds that came to witness the illumina- 
tion of the river at Richmond-on-Thames. 
Of their habit of cross-questioning you before they would 
give you a bit of information, the following early instance 
remains in my memory. In going for my first long walk south, 
I went for some refreshment into an inn on the very top of the 
backbone, whence the streams flowed on one side into the Don, 
and on the other side into the Mersey, and went therefrom into 
two different seas. As 1 sat in a very fine kitchen to eat my 
oatcake — an excellent light walking diet that does not oppress 
you a bit — 1 read, very well set out, these verses : — 
“ Customers came and I did trust ’em ; I lost my money and their custom. 
To lose them both it grieved me sore, so I resolved to trust no more.” 
These lines I had seen elsewhere in the South, but the 
following ones were new to me, and must, I thought, have been 
added by the local poet : — 
“ Trust is unuseful, say what you will ; trust never paid a maltster’s bill ; 
I strive to keep a decent tap, for ready money and no strap.” 
Desirous to know more about these lines, I interviewed the 
landlord, who, after cross-questioning me in the usual way, 
about what took me up there, where I had come from, who I 
was, and where I was going to, became at last quite pleasant 
in his information. The inn was, he told me, so large because, 
standing as it did, on the borders of three shires, a great 
market used to be held there before railways were invented — 
much, I supposed, as sheep and cattle fairs used to be held 
on some hills in Wessex — and that this was the only house at 
all near there. On learning that I was intending to walk to 
Chatsworth and Rowsley, he said that, as it was a wet Spring, 
I should find the path, in some places, what he called “a bit 
soft.” My ordnance map seemed to show that my moorland 
path took me over Featherbed Moss ; so I was glad when he 
