is served in it; brass bands make music on its terraces, and on its
highest terrace town councillors play bowls on billiard-table greens
while casting proud glances on the houses of thirty thousand people
spread out under the sweet influence of the gold angel that tops the
Town Hall spire. The other four towns are apt to ridicule that gold
angel, which for exactly fifty years has guarded the borough and only
been regilded twice. But ask the plumber who last had the fearsome job
of regilding it whether it is a gold angel to be despised, and--you will
see!

The other four towns are also apt to point to their own parks when
Bursley mentions its park (especially Turnhill, smallest and most
conceited of the Five); but let them show a park whose natural situation
equals that of Bursley's park. You may tell me that the terra-cotta
constructions within it carry ugliness beyond a joke; you may tell me
that in spite of the park's vaunted situation nothing can be seen from
it save the chimneys and kilns of earthenware manufactories, the
scaffoldings of pitheads, the ample dome of the rate-collector's
offices, the railway, minarets of non-conformity, sundry undulating
square miles of monotonous house-roofs, the long scarves of black smoke
which add such interest to the sky of the Five Towns--and, of course,
the gold angel. But I tell you that before the days of the park lovers
had no place to walk in but the cemetery; not the ancient churchyard of
St. Luke's (the rector would like to catch them at it!)--the borough
cemetery! One generation was forced to make love over the tombs of
another--and such tombs!--before the days of the park. That is the
sufficient answer to any criticism of the park.

The highest terrace of the park is a splendid expanse of gravel,
ornamented with flower-beds. At one end is the north bowling-green; at