Search -
Nobody knows, or, Facts that are not fictions, in the life of an unknown
Nobody knows or Facts that are not fictions in the life of an unknown Author:Nobody Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. The Samaritan Of The Slums. Horwich is an old city. Its walls are stones from a Roman camp—flints that once gave sparks to the horse-hoofs of Bo... more »adicea. Historic nodules—full of dead centurions and British chiefs. The streets are narrow—some so contracted a cat could spring on a mouse on the other side. It has a castle and a moat. It was where it is now when Canute let the tide wet his toes, and proved to his courtiers that a Channel wave had no respect for a royal chair. A cathedral with memories of Ethelred. A grammar school where Nelson wrestled with verbs before he fought with French admirals. Factories where the exiles of France and Flanders made shawls with bobbins of India silk, and a heath where martyrs gave their bodies to Queen Mary and their souls to God. A quaint and old-fashioned city, with Dutch gables and Flemish windows. Its streets named after saints, and taverns after kings, lions, horses,and graded cows. Some eighty thousand and more of gentry, artisans, and paupers, driving carriages and wheelbarrows, working looms and sewing-machines, and eating cake or red herring, as it may be, between the Wen sum and the Yare. Like the rest of us—good and bad. Going to London or the devil. Not boisterous or turbulent as the Northern folk, but none the less, though in a quieter fashion, vigorous in liberalism or granite-ribbed in conservatism. Eldon gets the upper ten—John Bright the lower thousand. Weavers and shoemakers going one way, to John Wesley—the other way, to Tom Paine. Methodists and sceptics divide the poor. Episcopalians and Nonconformity—the rich, with agnostics and politicians thrown in. The Old and the New, on the crack of the crisis. The poor are many. Poor pay, long hours, and a soup-ticket in winter, the programme of life. They swarm in bac...« less