Pole Moor Baptist Chapel stands in about as wild, bleak, and exposed a spot as a religious community could well have chosen for a place of spiritual communion, and the stranger passing that way must often have wondered whence its pastor drew his flock. I've heard my father tell that his church had its small beginnings in the very heart of Slaithwaite, worshipping in an upper chamber of "The Silent Woman," an inn whose sign depicted a female form bereft of head and so of tongue and speech. But the Earl of Dartmouth of that day owned all Slaithwaite and being, of course, a Churchman staunch and true, and, equally of course, a Tory the good old school, and believing, as Churchmen and Tories will believe despite long and bitter experience to the contrary, that the surest way to convince people of the error of their way and to convert them to the only true faith is to persecute and harry them, set about, or suffered his creature, the curate of St. James's, to persecute and harry the deluded worshippers at "The Silent Woman"--"hardbedders" they were called, because, I suppose, of the unbending and uncomfortable nature of their doctrine. They were driven from that snug hostelry and sought in vain within the domain of the Earl for land on which to build their little Bethel. So they were fain to erect their chapel on the moor edge, and many and steep and rough were the weary miles the elect must plod to reach their shrine. But plod them they did by the score, bringing their dinners with them, aye, and their teas, too, eating their meals, in the summer time, seated on the gravestones that soon began to dot the little graveyard of the chapel.