“I do not think that it is the partiality of a native that makes me think you could hardly find a fairer inland pastoral scene than the one I beheld from Wakefield Bridge the first time I stood there. On the chapel side there was the soft green English landscape, with woods and spires and halls, and the brown sails of boats silently moving among the flowery banks; on the town side there were picturesque traffic and life; the thundering weir, the wide still water beyond, the big dark-red granaries, with balconies and archways to the water, and the lofty white mills grinding out their cheering music. “But there were no worse shapes than honest, dusty millers’ men, and browned boatmen, decent people; no open vileness and foul language were rampant in our quiet clean town in those days. I can remember how clean the pavement used to look there, and at Doncaster. Both towns are incredibly dirty now. I cannot bear to look at the filthy beslavered causeway, in places where I remember to have never seen anything worse than the big round thunder-drops I used to watch with gleeful interest. “In those days we were proud of the cleanness and sweet air and gentility of Wakefield. Leeds was then considered rather vulgar, as a factory town, and Bradford was obscure, rough, and wild; but Wakefield prided itself in refined living on moderate means, and cultured people of small income were fond of settling there. “Market day used to be a great event for us all. “I wish that you could have seen the handsome farmers’ wives ranged round the church walls, with their baskets of apricots and cream cheese, before reform came, and they swept away my dear old school-house of the seventeenth century, to make an ugly barren desert of a market ground. You might have seen, too, the pretty cottagers’ daughters, with their bunches of lavender and baskets of fruit, or heaps of cowslips and primroses for the wine and vinegar Wakefield housewives prided themselves upon. On certain days they stood to be hired as maid-servants, and were prized in the country round as neat, clean, modest-spoken girls. “I do not know where they are gone to now,—I suppose to the factories. Anyhow, Wakefield ladies cry out that they must get servants from London, and Stafford, and Wales. So class gets parted from class. “Things were different then. Well-to-do ladies prided themselves on doing their marketing in person, and kindly feeling and acquaintanceship sprang up between town and country folk. My Wakefield friends nowadays laugh at the idea of going to market. They order everything through the cook, and hardly know their own tradespeople by sight. We used to get delicious butter at tenpence a pound, and such curds and cream-cheese as I never taste now. ‘Cook’ brings in indifferent butter mostly, at near two shillings.