A monument, 120 feet in height, stands on Captain’s Hill, Duxbury, to the memory of this stout but bashful sailor, and when the elements are kindly forms a conspicuous landmark. But rain is your portion in these latitudes, which perhaps is the reason why the present writer, not alone in this disability, failed to find that “Sea View” of which the sign of a wayside inn on the road from Chorley to Preston speaks. But after all, rain or shine, that is no wonder, for measured on the map, across the flattest of country, it is seven miles thence to the sea. Hard by, on the right hand, is Whittle-le-Woods—there should be elements of humour in the name to Americans, that nation of whittlers—celebrated (a strictly local celebrity) for its alkaline springs, sovereign, so they say, for rheumatic affections, but more potent, it would appear, in brewing, for “Whittle Springs Ale”—a kind of stingo—obtrudes upon you, on sign and hoarding, all the way into Preston. Clayton Green is an outlying settlement of Clayton-le-Woods, one of the several unimportant villages in the neighbourhood with that foreign conjunction. There is nothing whatever to be said of Clayton Green, which has a place in my memory only as the spot where, in an inclement summer, I stood sheltering under the dripping trees at the entrance to a park, and saw, as I shivered there in the cold wet blast, a hundred-legged insect happily crawl into his warm, snug crevice between the stones of the dry walling, out of the miserable day. And the cold wind blew, the rain, fell, and the motors swashed by in the ankle-deep slush of the muddy road, and it was yet over five miles to the outskirts of Preston. [Illustration: DARWEN BRIDGE AND WALTON-LE-DALE.] [Sidenote: _BAMBER BRIDGE_] Bamber Bridge, where you see, not the rustic bridge across the tributary of the Ribble that conferred the name upon the place, but instead a very busy and dirty railway level-crossing, is now; a something in the likeness of a busy town of cotton-spinning mills. Beyond it, the road comes to the Ribble itself, and to Darwen Bridge, rebuilt in 1901, the latest successor of the original bridge built in 1366 and rebuilt in 1752. [Sidenote: _PARSON WOODS, OF CHOWBENT_]