The chapel is about five yards wide, 15 yards long, very low on one side, and moderately high on the other.  It is plain, ricketty, and whitewashed.  The side wall of the railway bridge forms one end of it.  On the northern side, there is a door fastened up with a piece of wood in the form of a large loadstone.  This door leads to the top of a pig-stye.  The “chapel” will hold about 70.  When we visited it, the congregation consisted of 35 children of a very uneasy sort, 11 men, and five women.  Every now and then railway goods trains kept passing, and what with the whistling of the engines, the shaking caused by the waggons, the barking of a dog in a yard behind, the grunting of a pig in a stye three yards off, and the noise of the 35 children before us, we had a very refreshing time of it.  The congregation—­a poor one—­consists of a remnant of the Revivalists who were in Preston last year, and it has a kind of nominal connection with the Orchard United Methodists.  The building we have described was formerly a weaving shop or rubbish store.  Its present tenants have occupied it about twelve months.  They are an earnest body, seem obliging to strangers, are not as fiery and wild as some of their class, and might do better in the town if they had a better room.  They have no fixed minister.  The preacher we heard was a stranger.  He pulled off his coat just before beginning his discourse.  After a few introductory remarks, in the course of which he said he had been troubled with stomach ache for six hours on the previous day, and that just before his last visit to Preston he had an attack of illness in the very same place, a lengthy allusion was made to his past history.  He said that he had been “a villain, a gambler, a drunkard, and a Sabbath breaker”—­we expected hearing him say, as many of his class do, that he had often abused his mother, thrashed his wife, and punished his children, but he did not utter a word on the subject.  The remainder of his discourse was less personal and more orthodox.  At the close we descended the steps carefully, groped our way out quietly, and left, wondering how ever we had got to such a place at all, and how those worshipping in it could afford to Sabbatically pen themselves up in such a mysterious, ramshackle shanty.

ST. MARY’S AND ST. JOSEPH’S CATHOLIC CHAPELS.

In this combination the past and the present are linked.  Into their history the elements of a vast change enter.  One is allied with “saintly days,” followed by a reactive energy, vigorous and crushing; the other is amalgamated with an epoch of broadest thought and keenest iconoclasm; both are now enjoying a toleration giving them peace, and affording them ample room for the fullest progress.  Unless it be our Parish Church, which was originally a Catholic place of worship, no religious building in Preston possesses historic associations so far-reaching as St. Mary’s.  It is the oldest Catholic chapel in Preston.