Ballad-singers, or rather chanters or croakers,
are often to be met with in the streets, but hand-organ players are not
more frequent than in our cities.
I still observe little girls and other children barelegged and barefooted
on the wet sidewalks. There certainly never was anything so dismal as
the November weather has been; never any real sunshine; almost always a
mist; sometimes a dense fog, like slightly rarefied wool, pervading the
atmosphere.
An epitaph on a person buried on a hillside in Cheshire, together with
some others, supposed to have died of the plague, and therefore not
admitted into the churchyards:--
"Think it not strange our bones ly here,
Thine may ly thou knowst not where."
Elizabeth Hampson.
These graves were near the remains of two rude stone crosses, the purpose
of which was not certainly known, although they were supposed to be
boundary marks. Probably, as the plague-corpses were debarred from
sanctified ground, the vicinity of these crosses was chosen as having a
sort of sanctity.
"Bang beggar,"--an old Cheshire term for a parish beadle.
Hawthorne Hall, Cheshire, Macclesfield Hundred, Parish of Wilmslow, and
within the hamlet of Morley. It was vested at an early period in the
Lathoms of Irlam, Lancaster County, and passed through the Leighs to the
Pages of Earlshaw. Thomas Leigh Page sold it to Mr.
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