There remains a certain stateliness in the streets and houses of Preston: an aristocratic “county town” environment that not all the expansion of industrialism has been able to engulf: an eighteenth-century appearance that calmly declines to be hustled out of existence. The refinements of life, in so far as they are reflected by many dainty tea-shops and restaurants, are not lacking at Preston; but let the stranger come into the town on a Saturday night, and he will see another phase of existence, for then the place is typical of all Lancashire towns on that supreme marketing occasion. The streets are thronged with the people of Preston and all the villages round about: it is a marketing and pleasuring saturnalia, wherein the brilliantly lighted shops, the barrows, and the shows compete for the custom of thousands of good-humoured mill-hands whose weekly wages are burning holes in their pockets. Preston Town Hall was long pre-eminent among the town halls of Lancashire, and a source of peculiar pride to the townsfolk, but others have since eclipsed it. Designed by Sir Gilbert Scott, it looks like an instalment of St. Pancras station, in London, also designed by him, unaccountably mislaid in the provinces. Manchester, the biggest town, holding, _bien entendu_, all the tricks, has rightly gone Nap on town halls, and has won the game. Even in Preston its pre-eminence has since been challenged, for in the self-same square there stands the immense building of the Harris Institute and Public Library, designed in the Ionic order of architecture: a very severe Greek contrast with the gay Early English of the Town Hall. But there are even later competitors, the Sessions House and the Post Office, to challenge attention. Of these two, the first is in the present fashionable Eclectic Renaissance, while the Post Office is the product of the Office of Works, and of no style at all. The great square in which these various buildings stand is, therefore, nowadays very much an exhibition of architectural methods, incongruous and mutually destructive. [Illustration: “TEETOTAL”] Outside Preston, probably not one person in a thousand knows how the word “teetotal” sprang into popular use. It is said to have been, to all intents and purposes, deliberately invented by “Dicky Turner,” a reformed drunkard, who, speaking at a meeting held in September, 1833, at the Old Cockpit, declaimed vehemently against the arguments of the moderate drinkers, and insisted upon total abstinence. “I’ll have nowt to dee wi’ this moderation botheration pledge,” he said: “I’ll be reet down out—an’—out tee—tee—total for ever and ever.” “Well done,” shouted the meeting, and the word was adopted, with enthusiasm. [Sidenote: “_TEETOTAL_”]