That, however, is by no means the way to Chorley; but rather a side dish: albeit a good deal more appetising than the main road itself. Chorley was in Leland’s time, the matter of four hundred years ago, down in doleful dumps. “Chorle,” he notes, painstaking traveller that he was, “wonderful poor, having no market.” This is where your modern Chorleian smiles the smile of conscious worth, for the place is the antithesis of what it was then and is wonderfully rich and populous. At the same time, I do not find anything at all to say about it, except that continual tale of cotton-mills, supplemented here by calico-printing. There is an ancient parish church, with relics of St. Lawrence, its patron saint, brought from Normandy in 1442 by Sir Rowland Standish, and enclosed doubly behind glass and an iron grille; and with the elaborate canopied pew of the Standish family of Duxbury Park, near by. The Standishes number among their ancestors such diverse characters as that loyal squire, John Standish, who helped to dispatch Wat Tyler; and the much more famous Miles Standish, “a blunt old sea-captain, a man not of words, but of actions,” who, born in 1584, sailed with the Pilgrim Fathers to America in the _Mayflower_, in 1620. The Chorley parish register of baptisms in 1584, in which his name should occur, is defaced, lending some support to the theory that his claim to be the rightful heir to the Duxbury estate was feared by his contemporary relatives, who are in this manner suspected of seeking to invalidate it. Whatever his prospects of success, he relinquished them in sailing for New England, where he became the best-known of those early colonists, and has found apotheosis in Longfellow’s _Courtship of Miles Standish_. The poet represents him as the elderly widowed Governor of Plymouth, in love with Priscilla, and, at once too shy and too busy to do his own love-making, despatching his youthful secretary, John Alden—himself in love with Priscilla—to woo her, “the loveliest maiden in Plymouth,” by proxy. Poor John went on his mission, as he was bid, and loyally fulfilled it. But without avail. Miles, in John’s arguments, appeared to every advantage. He was a great man, the greatest in the colony, and heir to vast estates; a gentleman, like all the Standishes, with a silver cock, red-combed and wattled, for arms, and all the rest of it. But these great gifts were nothing to Priscilla, who no more than any other girl could endure love-making by deputy, and, seeing the true condition of affairs, asked, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”