This little rural party formed a beautiful group when some of them
with their milk-pails took shelter, as it began to rain, under a
part of the rock, beneath which they sat down on natural stone
benches, and there, with pastoral innocence and glee, talked and
laughed till the shower was over.
My way led me into the town, from whence I now write, and which I
intend leaving in order to begin my journey back to London, but I
think I shall not now pursue quite the same road.
CHAPTER XII.
Northampton.
When I took my leave of the honest shoemaker in Castleton, who would
have rejoiced to have accompanied me, I resolved to return, not by
Tideswell, but by Wardlow, which is nearer.
I there found but one single inn, and in it only a landlady, who
told me that her husband was at work in the lead mines, and that the
cavern at Castleton, and all that I had yet seen, was nothing to be
compared to these lead mines. Her husband, she said, would be happy
to show them to me.
When I came to offer to pay her for my dinner she made some
difficulty about it, because, as I had neither drank ale or brandy,
by the selling of which she chiefly made her livelihood, she said
she could not well make out my bill. On this I called for a mug of
ale (which I did not drink) in order to enable me the better to
settle her reckoning.
At this same time I saw my innkeeper of Tideswell, who, however, had
not, like me, come on foot, but prancing proudly on horseback.
As I proceeded, and saw the hills rise before me, which were still
fresh in my memory, having so recently become acquainted with them
in my journey thither, I was just reading the passage in Milton
relative to the creation, in which the Angel describes to Adam how
the water subsided, and
"Immediately the mountains huge appear
Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave
Into the clouds, their tops ascend the sky."
Book VII., 1. 285.
It seemed to me, while reading this passage, as if everything around
me were in the act of creating, and the mountains themselves
appeared to emerge or rise, so animated was the scene.
I had felt something not very unlike this on my journey hither, as I
was sitting opposite to a hill, whose top was covered with trees,
and was reading in Milton the sublime description of the combat of
the angels, where the fallen angels are made, with but little regard
to chronology, to attack their antagonists with artillery and
cannon, as if it had been a battle on earth of the present age.
