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IN the immediate
neighbourhood of Bradford, as
already indicated, the "quality." between sales of
land, absenteeism, and the dying-out of some old
families, fell so low that Mr Ferrand was left alone
as a residential and unyielding exponent and
champion of superseded feudalism, with its strong
blend of Tory-Socialism. Between 1833 and 1860,
power and wealth had passed from the old landed
gentry to the manufacturing and trading classes.
So, when household suffrage and the ballot came, it
was chiefly the ruling influence of the newly-enriched
which they diminished. As for professional classes,
ministers of religion, lawyers, doctors, and teachers,
they kept increasing in number in proportion to the
growth of population, but they had no prominent
part in public affairs.
The Irish Roman Catholics
formed a class by
themselves. In political and municipal matters they
were not so much guided by their priests as by the
disloyal and separatist organisations in Ireland and
the United States, for which most of the priests had
no love; which, indeed, they had good cause to
detest, because the Clan-na-Gael crimes in America
and the Fenian crimes at home not only brought
discredit on their Church, but also because by these
unholy secret societies great numbers were led away
into utter infidelity. However remiss in the observance of their religious duties many of the young
Irishmen of our district might have become, and
although some of them might even have swallowed
doses of infidel poison imported from Chicago and
New York, they all rose like one man in defence of
the true faith, to mob the foreigner, called the Baron
de Camin, when he came to Bradford to hold forth
upon the alleged immoralities of monks and nuns
abroad, and especially to denounce the intrigues of
the Jesuits. What a riot those defenders of the
faith kicked up! English-born Irishmen cannot
keep long, by association and environment, from
being insensibly Saxonised and forced to look at all
public questions in a broader and clearer light.
In public life, and, in a
more restricted way, in
social life there was a broad line of distinction
between Church and Dissent, but on the Church
side the line wavered far more than it did on the
other side; this was because the chapel organisations
were all gathered into a solid host under the Liberation Society and Free Trade conjoint banners. The
Church had no counterbalancing organisation and
mostly all its manufacturing and commercial members and adherents were free-traders, who had not
yet understood that the beautiful dream of free
exchange of goods all round was never to be realised,
but to lead shortly to the dumping of their goods in
our open markets by foreign rivals who shut our
goods out of their markets by bounties and prohibitive tariffs. Free imports of food, however, were so
great a boon to the working classes that they mistook this part of the theory for the whole and lost
sight of the other side of the matter. When Liberal
platform speakers could not otherwise get a rise out
of apathetic audiences, it was quite a common device
of theirs to bring in, by heels or head, the names of
Cobden and Bright, which usually, yet not always,
evoked loud cheers. Not always, for on questions
of foreign policy the masses, with their deep hereditary patriotism and pride in their native land,
believed far more in Lord Palmerston "Old Pam"
than in Manchester school political economists,
however much they felt obliged to the latter for free
importation of food. Radical working men did anything but bless the "broad brims" of his Cabinet
who prevented "Old Pam" from effectively interfering to save Denmark from German plunderers. It
was the general custom of the more advanced Liberal
writers and speakers, before and after the Civil
War, to belaud the constitution and institutions of
the United States slavery excepted. American
republicanism was held up for admiration as if the
United Kingdom would not be what it should be
until it had a President and a Congress. Well,
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," John Brown of immortal
memory, and the whole long agitation against the
slavery in the Southern States of the Union, had
enflamed our masses against slavery, and made them
at first hot partisans of the North. But when a
blustering Federal Navy captain dragged Mason
and Sliddel, the deputies sent by the Confederates
to plead their cause in Europe, out of a British mail
steamer on the high seas, a scowl of rage darkened
the faces of our patriotic operatives, which changed
into a gratified grin of joy when "Old Pam"
promptly resolved to send troops out to Halifax and
to make ready for war unless the indignity was
atoned for by liberating the seized deputies which
was done. That incident, with the wonderful
generalship of Lee, the Crornwellian heroism of Stonewall Jackson, and the
gallantry of the hopelessly outnumbered Confederates, caused a revulsion
of feeling in favour of the weaker side, and, on the
suppression of the rebellion, the doings of the carpet-baggers in the Southern States stripped the Great
Republic of a deal of its old reputation. Since then
scandals of millionairism, syndicates, combines, and
gigantic swindles by people who get the manipulation
of honest folks' money, have been a constant nightmare to all true American patriots, who wish nobly
to find correctives, but as yet have not met with the
desired success. The constitution and institutions
of the United States are theoretically good, and if
they were in the right hands and worked in the
right spirit should fulfil expectations. The misfortune is that they have been captured by organised
parties looking for spoils, and that by the very
machinery decreed for ensuring fulness and freedom
of elections and the choice of the worthiest have, by
the party ticket trick, been reduced to what is
nearly a sham. Liberal payment of members keeps
the ball of corruption merrily rolling. Those who
would be best men for Congress and State Legislatures, in many instances, turn away from public
life, and the voters, who, in the main, are patriotic,
honest people, leading industrious, moral lives, are
driven to put up with the ticket candidates.
In this twentieth century the
two great English-speaking nations live in bonds of peace and amity.
It ought to be so for ever. The bond of blood and
brotherhood, their common history, and law, legislation, and social customs should draw them ever closer
as the years slide by. But mutual criticism of fair
and kindly nature can only do good for both of
them. Our Radicals want payment of members of
Parliament. They openly advocate that as a first
step, but they do not intend to stop at that.
Socialists, in their general schemes of plunder, wish
to get for the members of all public bodies paid
salaries. What has come out of such payments in
the United States ought to be taken by sensible
Britons as a warning, and not as an example to be
imitated. Our constitutional monarchy is after all
the truest form of Republicanism, and it saves us
from the quadrennial turmoil of a presidential election, followed, when parties change sides, by a
wholesale distribution of offices from the highest to
the lowest from the village postmaster to the
President. Disestablishers at one time were never
weary of extolling the United States as a country
which was a highly-religious and Christian country,
in which all creeds were free, and in which there
was no Church connected with the State. I do not
know whether they will venture so loudly to praise
the religious and moral conditions of things there
now. At any rate when, for obtaining their support
at elections, they appeal to the predatory instincts of
Socialists and Radicals, by suggesting that a vast
amount of plunder would be made available for
distribution were the Church of England and
Church of Scotland disestablished, they should
remember that in the United States the various
religious bodies have been allowed to accumulate
property far exceeding that of the two national
Churches of this land, which alone make sure
provision for continuous religious worship in every
parish from Land's End to John O' Groats.
Republicanism as a
speculation and subject of debate was attractive to young men who fancied
themselves disciples of Mill, Huxley, and Morley, and likewise to older men
who posed as pundits of the so-called science of political economy then in
fashion. The hope of a successful rebellion in Ireland was dear to the
Irishmen who were connected with Fenian or Land League conspiracy, but,
take them in all, our classes and masses were loyal
subjects of Queen Victoria, and even chivalrously
and romantically proud of their dear Sovereign lady.
George Odger, one of the wildest of the London revolutionaries of that time,
confessed that revolution would be impossible during the Queen's reign when
he said "Me and my friends have resolved that the Prince of Wales shall
never ascend the throne of these realms." He and his friends did all they
could to make the Prince of Wales unpopular, and little did they profit
thereby. The marriage of the Heir-Apparent with the Princess Alexandra of
Denmark was celebrated in all our district with great rejoicings. Towns and
villages, even country-houses and scattered farmsteads, were made to look gay with
flags, arches, and devices of a benedictory and festive
character. Bonfires and illuminations followed at
night. I have never seen anything so striking as
the effect of the Bradford illuminations and bonfires
that night. Far up in the sky a dome of light hung
over the whole place. No doubt this was caused by
the situation of the town, which rises up surrounding
heights from the bottom of forked valleys. Soon
after their marriage the Royal couple came to visit
Lord Ripon at Studley Royal, and the Prince on that visit opened the new
town hall of Halifax. The West Riding people on that occasion gave them as
hearty and unanimous a welcome as could possibly be given. Years afterwards,
when the Prince was lying between life and death ill of fever at Sandringham, the bulletins were scanned with gloomy
anxiety from hour to hour until the crisis was over
and recovery ensured. Then a feeling of joyful
thankfulness spread over all the country.
The newly enriched middle
classes, who, in
urban and mining and manufacturing districts held
supremacy from the passing of the Reform Bill to
the coming of household suffrage with the ballot,
were not lacking in self-confidence, nor in good
intentions either. They administered local affairs
uprightly and sagaciously. Their ready acceptance
of the really grand, although never to be realised,
doctrine of cosmopolitan Free Trade somewhat
twisted and contracted their patriotism of which,
however, they had plenty. The individual freedom
and open career which formed part of the Manchester
school political-economy creed suited the self-made
or luck-made people of that period of transition from
handicrafts and domestic industries to the capitalist
and company monopolies which were to come, and
had to be confronted and counteracted by defensive,
and sometimes offensive and detrimental, trade-union forces. To persons who happened to own
fields or houses of little annual value before the
transformation began, fortunes came without their
own merit, but in ninety per cent, of cases it came
by devotion to business honestly conducted, prudent
investments, and habits of life moulded by Christian
morality, and a frugality which, as a rule, was quite
consistent with helpful aid to poor relations and
general liberality. Here a few typical cases of the
rise of the newly enriched may be cited in illustration of the changes brought about by the industrial
revolution. Mr Gathorne-Hardy, created Earl Cranbrook in 1892, received his peerage in reward
of political services, but derived his wealth from
great ironworks near Bradford, in which he had
inherited a heavy stake, and which had first been
made profitable in a high degree by the chemical
discoveries of a clerical ancestor of his. Mr Samuel
Cunliffe-Lister created Baron Masham belonged
by birth to the old smaller gentry of the locality,
but it was in his inventive brains that he had an
unfailing mine which finally made him wealthy in
old age, after having made and lost one or two
previous fortunes by letting others manage his
business while he became himself engrossed in new
inventions.
Mr Titus Salt, I think, was
the first of our
successful captains of industry who was created a
baronet. Mr Salt, who had made a moderate
fortune as a wool-stapler, got hold of a loom fit for
weaving alpaca wool, then a drug in the market,
and boldly launched into manufacturing that wool,
when for a time he could have a monopoly of that
branch of business. Wonderful success crowned his
efforts. When his wealth grew with something like
the rapidity of Jonah's gourd, he bought land on
the east of Shipley, on the bank of the Aire, and on
it built a gigantic mill, a fine village, and an Independent chapel, on the plan of the Paris Madeleine,
in which, when his time came, he was buried, and
which he intended to be forever his own and his
descendants' mausoleum. He had the biggest
funeral that had ever taken place in the Bradford
district. A high-class statue of him, in a shrine,
was placed in front of the Bradford Town Hall; and
and a Dissenting minister wrote a florid biography
of him. He liked praise and flattery, and in life
and death got plenty of both. He called his new
model village Saltaire, joining his own and the river
names together. He was generous with his money,
founded and endowed a school for Saltaire, was kind to the poor, the old,
and the afflicted, and gave donations to many charities. Within his proper
limits he was admirable as the organiser and controller of a great undertaking, and the provider on
fair terms of comfortable and sanitary houses for his
working people. But at the same time he was an
enlightened despot to them, or he that must be
obeyed. He transgressed his proper limits when he,
in his paltry quarrel on a political question with
Abraham Holroyd, acted the despot, Abraham
Holroyd was a poor, honest man who had a bookstall on the land of Sir Titus. In literary ability
and general intelligence he was the baronet's undoubted superior. Having
convictions of his own and the manliness to express them, and his views
being contrary to the views Sir Titus had adopted, Abraham, who refused to
recant or be silent, was deprived of his bookstall stand. On second
thoughts, however, Sir Titus saw he was wrong, and handsomely acknowledged his mistake. Masterful but
just, generous and well-meaning by nature, Sir
Titus, I think, was somewhat spoiled by the
obsequiousness of his own people, the hero-worship
given to him by his political and religious party,
and the well -deserved praises which were bestowed
on his model village in home and continental publications.
Up the hills in the direction
of Halifax there is
a village on the steep which for some cause perhaps the sign of a roadside inn was once called Queenshead. Its centre of industrial life was
Foster's mill, and as mill and village steadily grew
together the inhabitants objected to let the place
be any longer called by a name which had come by
public usage to mean a postage stamp. They therefore had their village
renamed Queensbury. Mr
John Foster, the founder, and in my time, with his
up-to-date sons as partners, the head of the manufacturing firm which gave this hill place its
prosperity and importance, was, while an excellent
business man, an unassuming old gentleman, who
liked to speak the dialect and stick to kindly,
homely, old-fashioned ways. There were not a few
other employers who had gained respect and clannish
loyalty from the people in their employment; but I
think the relations between Mr John Foster and his
operatives were the most patriarchal and materially
trustful and confidential that existed anywhere in a
district in which much of what was best in the
spirit of feudalism had passed from the "quality" to
the newly enriched. The Hornby estate with its
fine historical castle having come into the market,
Mr John Foster bought it for a high price, which he
paid down on the nail. He was not the man to buy
a pig in a poke, and so we may be sure he had
expert opinion to go upon before the sale took place.
It seems that he did not himself visit Hornby until after the price had been
paid and the transfer completed. One day a man who looked like a well-to-do, honest farmer, and who spoke the dialect as to
the manner born, entered the Hornby village inn,
and said he wanted to have a smoke and a glass of
beer. The innkeeper, who had no other customers
at the time, took him into the room reserved for his
genteeler guests, and then went for a glass of beer,
a churchwarden pipe, and a screw of tobacco. On
coming back with these supplies, he found that
some uppish young men had entered the room, and
that they were looking on the placid, farmer-like
man as if they objected to his presence. So, to
propitiate these gentry, the innkeeper said to Mr
Foster, "Will you please come with me to the
kitchen, as I think these gentlemen want to have
the room to themselves?" Mr Foster rose at once
and said nothing would suit him better than to have
his smoke and his drink at the kitchen fireside.
When host and guest settled themselves in the
warm, comfortable kitchen, they soon became chatty.
The stranger asked questions about the district,
and the host, puzzled by these questions, tried to
find what was the stranger's business in that part
of the country, where he had never seen him before.
At last the host, finding that circumlocution would
not do, put a direct question. The answer was
"Oh, I have bought some land hereabouts, and I
have come to see it." "Do you mean you have
bought a farm" "Yes." "I have not heard of
any farm having been sold in this neighbourhood;
what is the name of your farm?" "The name of
it that was given to me is the Hornby Castle estate."
Boniface was overwhelmed with surprise and very
unnecessary regret at having taken his new landlord
to the kitchen, but it was just the sort of incident
best suited to please Mr Foster.
Bradford, when I went there,
had a large staff of
merchants English, Scotch, German, Jewish who
traded with all parts of the world, and who. in their
Chamber of Commerce, discussed in the light of
experience questions affecting trade, finance, and
navigation. Besides those scattered out elsewhere,
Peel Square was surrounded by splendid merchant
warehouses. But until 1835, or thereabouts, the
state of things was wholly different. The manufacturers of the town and neighbourhood brought the
product of their mills to the old Piece Hall in
Market Street, and sold them there, chiefly to Leeds
merchants. When that old yoke of dependence was
shaken off, a feeling of rivalry, which continued
long, sprang up between Leeds and Bradford. But
when once started, the emancipation movement
could have but one issue. Bradford, in a few years,
made itself the unchallengable capital and emporium
of the worsted district. One of the earliest and
biggest Bradford merchant firms, that of Milligan
& Forbes, was founded by two Scotchmen, who were
a credit to their native land. Mr Forbes, on coming
to Bradford, set up a draper's shop, in which he
modestly prospered for many years. He was dead
before my time. Mr Robert Milligan, the senior
partner, who, for years after 1860, actively superintended the great business of the firm, started his
remarkable career in England as a packman. He
brought with him from Scotland a good parish school
education, spiced with Shorter Catechism theology,
and the aptitude for business and. moral qualities
which led to success. An observant and most
intelligent and, withal, a most unassuming young
man was Mr Robert Milligan. When a merchant
prince and held in high reverence and respect by
the whole community among whom he had lived
and prospered so long, he was so far from concealing
his humble start in life, that he placed his old pack
in the entrance hall of his mansion of Acacia, and
was always ready to draw the attention of guests
to it, and to tell stories of his experiences and
adventures as a pedlar or travelling merchant who
carried all his stock-in-trade on his back. Mr
Milligan had the clannishness of a Scotchman. So
he found openings for many of his relations, and also
for not a few countrymen who were no relations at
all. As he had no children of his own, his great
wealth was by his will carefully and justly distributed
among a large number of people connected with him
by blood or marriage, his wife's kindred sharing
with his own.
William Brown, a saddler by
trade, came from
Otley, his native place, to Bradford, and bought or
rented two united cottages in Market Street, then
newly made, one in which he lived and the other in
which he had his shop and working place. Having
thus established himself, he looked about for a wife,
and found one who was a treasure in herself in
Elizabeth Ingham, of a good old Bradford stock.
Their marriage took place shortly before or after
1800. If the cottages were not his own at first, he
became the owner of them before his death some ten
years later, when his widow and their only child,
Henry Brown, were left with these cottages as all
that came to them from husband and father. They
prospered because the widow was a strong-minded,
high-principled business woman, who managed to
lay broad and firm foundations for what has long
been, and still is, the largest drapery and outfitting
establishment in Bradford and its district. When
they married, William Brown was a Churchman,
and Elizabeth Ingham belonged to the Independent
Chapel which the orthodox Presbyterians formed, when the Unitarian majority
got hold of the old Chapel Lane place of worship and its endowment. The
strife between Church and Dissent had, at the beginning of last century, for
several reasons much subsided in Bradford. One of these reasons was the
lapsing of the majority of the Presbyterians into Unitarianism, which gave a
shock to orthodox Dissenters, and another was the Wesleyan revival, which
swept into its broad stream both church -folk and chapel-folk. It was not
also without a modifying effect that the then vicar of Bradford was a
fervent evangelical who compelled respect from the old Dissenters, and whom
the Wesleyans so honoured that during his life they continued to communicate
and have their children baptized and confirmed in the Parish Church. After
marriage, while William Brown continued as before to worship in the Parish
Church, his wife stuck to her Independent Chapel, and took their boy Henry
with her there as soon as he could walk to it. There is, I suppose,
everywhere a business connection side to religious associations, and in
England, I think, this side is far more apparent than in Scotland. Whether
or not her husband's connection with the Parish Church brought customers to
Elizabeth when left a widow, I cannot say with certainty, but there is no
doubt at all that she profited by chapel connection. On her husband's death
she disposed of his stock-in-trade, and converted his saddlering cottage into a drapery shop
and a store for children's ready-made clothes. She
sold for cash down to the general public, and only
gave short credit in exceptional cases to purchasers
she well knew and could trust. She had a head for
business and closely attended to it. Her customers
soon became numerous. They knew her straight-forward way, and that there was no use in haggling
with her. They had to pay the price she first
mentioned, or else to leave without getting what
they wanted. She made few or no losses. She was
content with small profits, but as these small profits
grew into tidy heaps, she looked about for safe
investments, and as the town was growing at a
great pace, readily found them. While of a saving
disposition, she was anything but miserly. To kith
and kin who needed help, she gave it liberally and
ungrudgingly. She took care that Henry, her son,
should have a good education, and should from
infancy be brought up in the way he should go.
She bestowed similar care on cousins of his who came
under her protection. Her son, Henry Brown, fulfilled her expectations. He was for a life-time a
member of the Bradford Town Council, was elected
Mayor three times in succession, and took a prominent part in the public life and progress of the town
and neighbourhood. The business built by his
mother on sure foundations enormously increased
under the management of Mr Henry Brown and his
brother-in-law, Mr T. P. Muff, whom he took into
partnership with him, and in due time new and
spacious premises were built for it on the sites of the
old cottages and their annexes in Market Street.
Mr Brown's son, an only child, died in his infancy.
Having no child of his own to educate and provide
for, Mr Brown spent a large portion of his wealth
upon the promotion of the higher education of the
children of other people, especially those who could
not afford to pay for it. The Bradford Grammar
School and the corresponding higher school for girls
received large endowments from him while living,
and more by will. Besides what he spent on charitable and educational institutions when alive, his
executors had to pay 26,000 to charities of various
kinds before distributing the rest of his fortune
among his blood relations by father arid mother's
side, some fifty in number, according to the specific
instructions contained in his will.
Old Mrs Brown was able to
grow with her
circumstances and to wisely enjoy the fortune she
had made, although to the last she was, by precept
and example, a preacher of righteousness against
waste, laziness and fechlessness. When she saw
the business nourishing in her son's hands, she
removed her habitation from Market Street to a
commodious house in the suburbs, in which friends
and acquaintances were sure of receiving a hospitable welcome, and which was a place of recuperance
for the many young relatives whom she had helped
on their onward course. Mrs Eennie, the well endowed and comfortably housed widow of a
merchant, was not able, like Mrs Brown, to grow
with her circumstances, and yet she was a sympathetic and generous helper
to afflicted people she knew, and liberal in her donations to chapels and
charities. As far as food, fire, and other comforts were concerned she did
not stint herself and her servants. But she stuck to some habits of her
early days, probably days of pinching and struggling, which made her seem
very eccentric to later generations. When her husband was alive she made
dresses for herself out of fents or remnants of webs,
of different shades of one colour say red, blue, or
grey, because the fents could not be better utilised,
and the dresses were as clean and comfortable as if
they were of the same shade of colour. From early
days to the end of a long life, Harrogate was
the only place to which she went for her summer
"outing." There were some cottage lodgings there
which she had trysted from year to year. She used
to go with the carrier's cart, and to take supplies
from home with her. Then came a year when a
coach regularly plied between Bradford and Harrogate, but Mrs Rennie stuck to the carrier, and would
not look at the coach nor afterwards at the railway
either. Unfortunately her faithful allegiance to use
and wont gave her, when quite an old widow, a
broken leg, through a fall from the top of the
carrier's cart. After that accident, I think she gave
up going to Harrogate. She had no patience with
dressy servant maids nor with any man or woman
that would not put their hand to any kind of useful
work. A lady friend, when passing Mrs Rennie's
house one day, saw her hastily coming out with a
jug in her hand and crossing the street to a milk
cart standing on the other side, where she got it
filled, and paid the milkman. The lady stopped till
Mrs Rennie crossed back, to remonstrate with her
for not sending her maid on all such errands.
"Bless you!" was the reply, "my maid would take
half-an-hour to dress before she would think herself
fine enough to come out of the house, and do you
think I could let the man stop waiting for her when
I could come myself at once for my three pennies'
worth of milk?"
It was in a larger measure
than is generally
recognised owing to the British mothers who kept
a firm grip on Christian faith and morals that a
hundred years ago our country escaped the double
danger of conquest by the greatest war lord the
world has ever seen, and of suffering severe and
instant demoralisation from an industrial revolution, which substituted
collectivism for the old handicraft arts and domestic industries, and made
the working classes to a large extent mere attachments and slaves to
machinery. With unshaken confidence and fixed family-life principles, which
they knew to be blessed by Almighty God, the noble British mothers of that
era bred and trained brave sons and virtuous daughters. Many of the sons
went forth to fight for their country by sea and land. By sea victory was
always with the British warriors. By land the British soldiers fought on
undismayed by trials and disappointments until Napoleon was finally defeated at
Waterloo, and sent like a caged eagle to the lonely
yet pleasant island of St Helena. The daughters
had to fight their own battles against demoralising
influences in the mixed assemblages of mills and
other places where many worked together, and
upon the whole they fought these fights victoriously,
and became in their turn wives and mothers like
the mothers who had borne and trained them.
One of my first impressions
of the natives of the worsted district was that they were much alike,
whether rich or poor, a hard-headed, practical people, of whom it was not
easy even for a Yankee, although that happened once if not oftener to get
the better in a deal. But if hard they were upright in their dealings, and
in social relations their hardness frequently converted itself into the
generous deeds, which shun rather than seek publicity and applause. Further acquaintance revealed
unsuspected strains of romance and stores of sentiment, well kept out of sight, but which had still a
softening influence on life and character. They had
much humour of a caustic kind, which sometimes,
as in the case of a Wesleyan local preacher, assumed
an irreverent or grotesque form. When working
up a revival movement, this local preacher is said
to have fervently prayed, "Lord, send down Thy
Spirit upon us this minute, through the ceiling, and
never mind expenses." On another occasion, to
illustrate how easy it was to slide downward into
sin, and how difficult to pull upwards without
Divine help, he slid down the bannister on the
outside of the pulpit stair, and then began to
struggle to pull himself up with puffing and
difficulty. But the highest flight of his peculiar
humour took place in an outlying village, where he
was to hold a series of meetings. He was much
dissatisfied with the poor attendance at the first
meeting, and said so. He then with a solemn face
announced that at the next meeting he intended to
make a pair of shoes in the pulpit. That singular
announcement gave him a crowded audience at the
next meeting all agog to see how he was to fulfil
his promise. He made his way through that crowd
with a pair of old boots in one hand and a big sharp
knife in the other. He mounted the stair into the
pulpit, turned to the audience without a smile on
his face, cut off the tops of the boots and flung them
over the side, then held up the truncated remains,
and called them the pair of shoes he had made in
their presence. After that he launched out in racy
dialect ridiculing them for their readiness to be
attracted by such a silly device as a promise to make
a pair of shoes in a pulpit, and their unreadiness to
assemble to hear God's Word, and to come with
their sins, to pray for grace and mercy and guidance
at His footstool. |
