The Town Hall of Bolton, designed in a composite classic style, is, in most of its circumstances, a good deal more imposing than useful. A weary flight of steps leads lengthily up to the colonnaded portico, and although it looks magnificent, is, practically, a sorrow to all who have often to scale it. A clock-tower, 220 feet in height, surmounts this elephantine building, which cost £170,000, and has so imposing an appearance that it has been the parent of many others; the design having been so admired that it was closely copied in every detail by Leeds, Portsmouth, and other towns; Paddington also proposing to build itself one upon the same model. But the Bolton parent of them all has become very grim; being, by reason of the smoke from the two hundred or so lofty factory chimneys of the town, “as black as your hat.” XI [Illustration: FIRWOOD: BIRTHPLACE OF CROMPTON.] The most interesting places in Bolton are—to speak in paradox—just outside it. On the Bury road, where the electric tramcars race, you may with some difficulty find the little turning at Firwood, where the humble birthplace of Samuel Crompton still stands. Along the main road the modern houses march prosaically on to Bury, but down this little turning, which descends steeply and has the most extravagantly uneven paving anywhere in the neighbourhood, you find a nook very much in the condition of the whole countryside in Crompton’s day. Always excepting, of course, the big cotton-mill that stands here. Looking down towards Bolton there are still fragments of woods and tangled brakes—fir-woods, or others—but on the skyline, as ever in Lancashire, are factory chimneys, wreathing fantastic smoke-trails. Among the three cottages here, Crompton’s early home is identified by a stone tablet inscribed— Birthplace of SAMUEL CROMPTON. Born Decr. 3rd, 1753. I look at that humble, stone-built cot with something of reverence. It did not, however, witness his bringing-up, for when he was but five years of age, his parents removed to Hall-i’-th’-Wood, an ancient mansion from which the owners had migrated to a more modern residence. Here the Cromptons farmed in a small way, and here Samuel’s father early died. [Sidenote: _HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD_] Hall-i’-th’-Wood (the Lancashire pronunciation may be written down “Hauleythwood”) stands in a situation still romantic, in the parish of Tonge, one mile from Bolton, on the Blackburn road. The great and ancient woods of oak that once surrounded the old house are gone since then, but the Eagley Brook yet comes foaming down in little cascades amid the rocks of the picturesque gorge above whose crest the Hall is situated; and there are patches of woodland remaining to inform the scene with sylvan beauty. It is, frankly, a surprise, set as it is at the very edge of the roaring traffic of a high road with shops where housewives are bidden by leather-lunged butchers “Buy, buy, buy”: and as delightful as surprising.