The men of Cheshire have on occasion, and conspicuously during the Civil War, approved themselves for valour. When the royalist garrison of Beeston Castle, the "other hill" of this pancake county, was at last forced to accept terms from the Roundhead troops, there was "neither meat nor drink found in the Castle, but only a piece of a turkey pie, two biscuits, and a live pea-cock and pea-hen." Yet Cheshire is famed rather for the virtues of peace,--for thrift, civility, and neighbourly kindness. An early-seventeenth-century "Treatise on Cheshire" says: "The people of the country are of a nature very gentle and courteous, ready to help and further one another; and that is to be seen chiefly in the harvest time, how careful are they of one another." A few years later, in 1616, a native of the county wrote of it not only as producing "the best cheese of all Europe," but as blessed with women "very friendly and loving, painful in labour, and in all other kind of housewifery expert." The accepted chronicler of Cheshire womanhood, however, is Mrs. Gaskell. As we lingered along the pleasant streets of Knutsford--her Cranford--and went in and out of the quiet shops, we blessed her memory for having so delectably distilled the lavender essences of that sweet, old-fashioned village life. She had known it and loved it all the way from her motherless babyhood, and she wrote of it with a tender humour that has endeared it to thousands. Our first Knutsford pilgrimage was to her grave beside the old Unitarian chapel, for both her father and her husband were clergymen of that faith. We had seen in Manchester--her Drumble--the chapel where Mr. Gaskell ministered, and had read her "Mary Barton," that sympathetic presentation of the life of Lancashire mill-hands which awoke the anger and perhaps the consciences of the manufacturers. She served the poor of Manchester not with her pen alone, but when our war brought in its train the cotton famine of 1862-63, she came effectively to their relief by organizing sewing-rooms and other means of employment for women. Husband and wife, fulfilled of good works, now rest together in that sloping little churchyard which we trod with reverent feet.