prayed by the body. The last words he
spoke, even now ring in my ears. "Too
late!"

LANCASHIRE WITCHCRAFT.

It is a little more than a century since, when
women who were the possessors of black cats;
who were much out of doors on windy nights;
who said or did things beyond the
comprehension of their neighbours; and who, in
addition to all this, committed the offence of
being particularly good-looking or extremely
ugly, were either burned or drowned according
to the tastes of the operators, as being
veritable, unmistakable witches. We of the
nineteenth century may congratulate
ourselves and our female friends that the dangers,
if not the practice, of witchcraft have passed
away for ever. We are personally acquainted
with no end of bewitching young ladies who
possess cats of all shades of colour, who pay
frequent visits upon windy nights, yet who
are without the least fear of stake or
duckpond before their pretty eyes.

These are not the witches about whom it
is our present intention to discourse.

Ethiopic sorcery, Chaldean magic, Egyptian
necromancy, Arabian cabalistics, are as
air-bubbles before the steam-and-metal
witchcraft of Lancashire. Miles of bleak, barren
plain have been thickly peopled with human
toilers; leagues of silent valleys have been
made to send forth busy sounds of
never-ending labour. The moorland is replete
with life; the treacherous moss and yawning
gully are spanned by metal roads, over which
the magic power of steam whirls endless trains.
Hamlets are towns, villages are cities, the
hovel and the hut are swollen to mighty
fabrics, in each of which a thousand of our
fellows are toiling "from morn to dewy eve."
And all of this and more is the handy-work
of Lancashire Witchcraft.

Not very long ago some few of the oldest
inhabitants of the shire remember when
Manchester was considered a rather rising
town; when Preston, Oldham, Macclesfield,
Staleybridge, and a good score or so of other
leading manufacturing towns of to-day were
but simple groups of houses, with here and
there a tall smoking chimney rising among
the trees and hills to tell of the adventurous
spirit of the Lancashire spinners; when
manufacturers and dealers in yarns rode
through the countiy on pack-horses to buy or
sell their goods as the case might be; and
when the introduction of steam-power weaving
was deemed an act of insane folly that
must sooner or later end in the ruin of the
speculators. There are scores of Lancashire
folks who remember right well when the
magnificent pile of warehouses in Spinning-jenny
Street, close by the Royal Hotel, in
Manchester, was but a narrow range of crabbed
old beetle-browed store-rooms. Forty years
ago, Elkanah Shuttle and Cyrus Waterloom,
who own the splendid palatial edifice half
way up the street, with the magnificent
portico, the sweeping staircase, the mediæval
hall, the artistic show-rooms, the Crystal-Palace
roofing, were unknown beyond their
own village. One made his way to
Manchester with all his worldly possessions in a
small bundle at his back; the other arrived
shortly after him, by one of the canal-boats;
to this day the crooked stick of Elkanah and
the yarn pack of Cyrus are preserved in a
glass-case among the archives of the firm.
These men have risen by the potent aid of
Lancashire Witchcraft; so, likewise, have
hundreds of their fellow-citizens, as rich and
powerful as themselves, but not as mindful
of the stick and pack.

Mighty, indeed, are the dealings of these
cotton monarchs. Complicated are their
transactions; numberless the interests they affect;
and far away and strange the lands they give
vitality to, the mouths they feed, the forms they
clothe. Our Witchcraft is felt in all the four
quarters of the world: from Crim Tartary to
Zulu Kaffirland, from the frozen homes of
the Esquimaux to the palmy groves of the
Oriental. Many are the races who help to
feed those craving machines, ever consuming
cotton at the modest rate of thirty thousand
bales of three hundredweights each, weekly.

The patient poverty-stricken Hindoo ryot,
in the hot valleys of Berar, among the wooded
hills of Candeish; the active Malabar coolie
on the sandy plains of Travancore and
Tinnivelly; the abject Egyptian, a slave in all but
the name, groaning as he toils at his cotton
task for masters more exacting than in the
days of Pharoah; the slave in the southern
states of America, and the kingdoms and
republics of the southern continent; all these
labour for one end, all help to send their
quota of the fibre that ere long shall be seen
whirling and twisting round metal rods, or
darting in between fine polished meshes. And
soon it shall be dressed, and bleached, and
dyed, and calendered, and hot-pressed, and
finally make its new advent as a radiant
garment, a flowing robe, a brilliant shawl or
handkerchief, a simple piece of bobbin or
tape, a piece of bed-hanging, a jack towel or
a waistcoat piece. Or perchance Lancashire
Witchcraft will cunningly throw in a small
quantity of silk or alpaca amongst the cotton
fibres; and lo! a compound of a new and
startling character appears. Soft, glossy
shades, bright tinted, many coloured, with
devices, and reliefs, and borders, endless.

But it is not alone in quantity, and style,
and combination, that this Witchcraft is so
distinguished. It brings about, other and still
more surprising results. The most remote
grown of our raw cottons are those from
Central India: which, from hill-side to port of
shipment, thence to Liverpool, and so on to
the restless machinery of the Lancashire
factories, cannot be a less distance than
eighteen thousand miles in round numbers.