We Took Our Seats With Him On The Outside Of
The Coach, And Were Rolled Along Smoothly Through A Level
Country of farms
and hedge-rows, and fields yellow with buttercups, until at the distance
of seven miles we reached
Stockport, another populous manufacturing town
lying in the smoke of its tall chimneys. At nearly the same distance
beyond Stockport, the country began to swell into hills, divided by brooks
and valleys, and the hedge-rows gave place to stone fences, which seamed
the green region, bare of trees in every direction, separating it into
innumerable little inclosures. A few miles further, brought us into that
part of Derbyshire which is called the Peak, where the hills become
mountains.
Among our fellow-passengers, was a powerfully made man, who had the
appearance of being a commercial traveller, and was very communicative on
the subject of the Peak, its caverns, its mines, and the old ruined castle
of the Peverils, built, it is said, by one of the Norman invaders of
England. He spoke in the Derbyshire dialect, with a strong provincial
accent. When he was asked whether the castle was not the one spoken of by
Scott, in his Peveril of the Peak, he replied,
"Scott? Scott? I dunna know him."
Chapel-en-le-Frith is a manufacturing village at the bottom of a narrow
valley, clean-looking, but closely built upon narrow lanes; the houses
are of stone, and have the same color as the highway. We were set down,
with our Derbyshire friend, at the Prince's Arms, kept by John Clark, a
jolly-looking man in knee-breeches, who claimed our fellow passenger as an
old acquaintance. "I were at school with him," said he; "we are both
Peakerels." John Clark, however, was the more learned man of the two, he
knew something of Walter Scott; in the days when he was a coachman, he had
driven the coach that brought him to the Peak, and knew that the ruined
castle in the neighborhood was once the abode of Scott's Peveril of the
Peak.
We procured here an odd vehicle called a car, with seats on the sides
where the passengers sit facing each other, as in an omnibus, to take us
to Edale, one of the valleys of Derbyshire. Our new acquaintance, who was
about to proceed on foot to one of the neighboring villages, was persuaded
to take a seat with us as far as his road was the same with ours. We
climbed out of the valley up the bare green hills, and here our driver,
who was from Cheshire, and whose mode of speaking English made him
unintelligible to us, pointed to a house on a distant road, and made an
attempt to communicate something which he appeared to think interesting.
Our Derbyshire friend translated him.
"The water," said he, "that fall on one side of the roof of that 'ouse go
into the 'Umber, and the water that fall on the other side go into the
Mersey.
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