Mountford’s remark as to the Highlanders being without breeches is especially amusing. He had obviously never before seen, or heard of, kilts, and appears to think they went without breeches because they were too poor to afford them. He was not alone in this view of the “petticoat men,” as the people styled them. [Sidenote: “_NOW THUS_”] In the church of St. Edward is the singular memorial of William Trafford of Swithamley, who died in 1697, aged ninety-three, and is the hero of a legend pictured on the sign of the “Old Rock House” Inn at Barton, near Manchester. Rudely sculptured on the tomb is the figure of a man threshing corn, with the words “Now thus,” alluding to the only words he would utter when, many years earlier, during the Civil War, the Roundhead soldiery burst into his house and found the place empty except for himself, whom they discovered in the barn, monotonously repeating those meaningless words. They thought him a “poor natural,” and so departed, but he was not quite the fool he seemed, for beneath the threshing-floor he had hidden most of his valuables. XXXII The road loaves Leek again downhill, descending to the river Churnet, with the long expanse of Rudyard Lake stretching for two miles on the left hand. This was cut as a reservoir for feeding the Trent and Mersey, and Leek and Cauldon Canals; but has long been, in addition, a holiday-resort and picnic-place, where boating and yachting are to be had, with plenty of elbow-room for any likely number of the excursionists brought to Rudyard station by the North Staffordshire Railway. Rudyard is, in consequence of all these things, a village where every cottage provides teas and refreshments. The most notable of them is the house called Spite Hall, at the north end of the lake. The legendary lore of the place tells how this was originally built by some malevolent person, to “spite” the owner of Rudyard Villa, standing immediately behind it, with the object of obliterating the view; which it certainly very effectively does, the only view that Rudyard Villa now enjoys being the back wall of Spite Hall, at the distance of a few feet. But this is a picturesque way of putting the simple fact that the owner of the land, by exercising his right of building, incidentally disestablished a cherished view. There was not, necessarily, any spite in it. But this is the stuff that legends are made of. [Sidenote: _RUSHTON SPENCER_] Rushton Marsh stands where Rudyard Lake ends, on a rivulet falling presently into the river Dane. On the hill above, coyly hiding behind some farmyards and cowsheds, and up along muddy tracks that it is a sorrow to trace, stands the little church of Rushton Spencer, with a turret which suggests its having been designed by an architect of packing-cases. A closely ranked number of very grim tombstones fill the ill-kept churchyard, among them one with this inscription: