newest factory towns of this region. It stands on the slope of a hill at
the foot of which are the canal and the river Tame, and is, in general,
built on the newer, more regular plan. Five or six parallel streets
stretch along the hill intersected at right angles by others leading down
into the valley. By this method, the factories would be excluded from
the town proper, even if the proximity of the river and the canal-way did
not draw them all into the valley where they stand thickly crowded,
belching forth black smoke from their chimneys. To this arrangement
Ashton owes a much more attractive appearance than that of most factory
towns; the streets are broad and cleaner, the cottages look new, bright
red, and comfortable. But the modern system of building cottages for
working-men has its own disadvantages; every street has its concealed
back lane to which a narrow paved path leads, and which is all the
dirtier. And, although I saw no buildings, except a few on entering,
which could have been more than fifty years old, there are even in Ashton
streets in which the cottages are getting bad, where the bricks in the
house-corners are no longer firm but shift about, in which the walls have
cracks and will not hold the chalk whitewash inside; streets, whose
dirty, smoke-begrimed aspect is nowise different from that of the other
towns of the district, except that in Ashton, this is the exception, not
the rule.

A mile eastward lies Stalybridge, also on the Tame. In coming over the
hill from Ashton, the traveller has, at the top, both right and left,
fine large gardens with superb villa-like houses in their midst, built
usually in the Elizabethan style, which is to the Gothic precisely what
the Anglican Church is to the Apostolic Roman Catholic. A hundred paces
farther and Stalybridge shows itself in the valley, in sharp contrast
with the beautiful country seats, in sharp contrast even with the modest
cottages of Ashton! Stalybridge lies in a narrow, crooked ravine, much