The “original” heading-axe that decapitated the bloody Earl, who richly deserved his fate, is shown in the inn, which is merely a public-house, together with the chair he sat upon. But a chair also purporting to be the identical one is among the relics at the Earl of Derby’s seat at Knowsley, where there is probably another heading-axe. The only way out of this awkward _impasse_, to please every one, is to suggest that, being an important personage, he was given two chairs to sit upon and was executed twice, by two executioners! One can say no fairer than that.
The “Old Man and Scythe,” it should be added, looks in the illustration a highly picturesque half-timbered building: but it is really commonplace brick, and the “timbering” is but a product of the house-painter’s brush.
At “Bowton,” more than anywhere else along the road, you hear the Lancashire talk, and the people of the town are as rough-and-ready as any in the county, both in manners and in appearance. Even in Lancashire they talk of a “rough Bolton chap,” and as less refined than the people of Wigan, St. Helens, or Widnes; which is very like Walworth reflecting upon the lack of culture in Whitechapel. A good deal of this apparent brusqueness and rudeness is, however, more apparent than real. The Londoner, come from a place where a great deal of insincerity, and even callousness, is hidden by the veneer of conventional behaviour, is startled and shocked by the forthright manners and the very frank speech of Bolton and other manufacturing towns, but there is a heartiness about the people there is no mistaking. That typical character, “John Blunt,” has certainly peopled Lancashire with his kin.
The clogs still clatter on the pavements of Bolton, and shawled girls are yet to be seen going to and from the mills, but even in the last fifteen years Bolton has grown enormously, not only in population but towards a higher standard of life. Yet, to this writer at least, the thought of Bolton will ever recall the odour of fried fish; for it was on a winter’s evening, long ago, that he first came into the grim town. Fried-fish shops filled the air with a revolting reek, and everywhere along the pavements walked those who without ceremony ate their suppers out of newspapers. High above, yellow in the dark sky, like bilious eyes, glowered the illuminated dials of the Town Hall clock, while ever and again the quarters chimed and the hours growled out.