certainly one of the most beautiful shrubs in the world, so far as
foliage goes. We saw one cottage which I suppose was several hundred
years old. It was of stone, filled into a wooden frame, the black-oak of
which was visible like an external skeleton; it had a thatched roof, and
was whitewashed. We passed through a village,--higher Bebbington, I
believe,--with narrow streets and mean houses all of brick or stone, and
not standing wide apart from each other as in American country villages,
but conjoined. There was an immense almshouse in the midst; at least, I
took it to be so. In the centre of the village, too, we saw a
moderate-sized brick house, built in imitation of a castle with a tower
and turret, in which an upper and an under row of small cannon were
mounted,--now green with moss. There were also battlements along the
roof of the house, which looked as if it might have been built eighty or
a hundred years ago. In the centre of it there was the dial of a clock,
but the inner machinery had been removed, and the hands, hanging
listlessly, moved to and fro in the wind. It was quite a novel symbol of
decay and neglect. On the wall, close to the street, there were certain
eccentric inscriptions cut into slabs of stone, but I could make no sense
of them. At the end of the house opposite the turret, we peeped through
the bars of an iron gate and beheld a little paved court-yard, and at the
farther side of it a small piazza, beneath which seemed to stand the
figure of a man. He appeared well advanced in years, and was dressed in
a blue coat and buff breeches, with a white or straw hat on his head.
Behold, too, in a kennel beside the porch, a large dog sitting on his
hind legs, chained! Also, close beside the gateway, another man, seated
in a kind of arbor! All these were wooden images; and the whole
castellated, small, village-dwelling, with the inscriptions and the queer
statuary, was probably the whim of some half-crazy person, who has now,
no doubt, been long asleep in Bebbington churchyard.