“Then you are a Churchman?”

And the old man wiped his glasses and told me that he was a Churchman, although an unworthy one, and had been for fifty-four years, come Michaelmas.  Yes, he had always lived here, was born only across the beck away—­his father was gamekeeper for Lord Cardigan, and afterwards agent.  He had been to Haworth many times, although not for ten years.  He knew the Reverend Patrick Bronte well, for the Incumbent from Haworth used to preach at Keighley once a year, and sometimes twice.  Bronte was a fine man, with a splendid voice for intoning, and very strict about keeping out all heresies and such.  He had a lot of trouble, had Bronte:  his wife died and left him with eight or ten children, all smart, but rather wild.  They gave him a lot of bother, especially the boy.  One of the girls married Mr. Bronte’s curate, Mr. Nicholls, a very decent kind of man who comes to Keighley once a year, and always comes to the factory to ask how things are going.

Yes, Mr. Nicholls’ first wife died years and years ago.  She used to write things—­novels; but no one should read novels; novels are stories that are not so—­things that never happened; they tell of folks that never was.

Having no argument to present in way of rebuttal, I shook hands with the old man and started away.  He walked with me to the road to put me on the right way to Haworth.

Looking back as I reached the corner, I saw four “clarks” watching me intently from the office windows, and above the roar and jangle of machinery was borne on the summer breeze the sound of sacred song—­shrill feminine voices: 

“Aws ut wuz in th’ beginnin’, uz now awn ever shawl be, worl’ wi’out end—­Aamen!”

* * * * *

As one moves out of Keighley the country becomes stony; the trees are left behind, and there rises on all sides billow on billow of purple heather.  The way is rough as the Pilgrim’s Progress road to Paradise.  These hillside moors are filled with springs that high up form rills, then brooks, then cascades or “becks,” and along the Haworth road, wherever one of these hurrying, scurrying, dancing becks crosses the highway, there is a factory devoted to keeping alive the name of Cardigan.  Next to the factory is a “pub.,” and publics and factories checker themselves all along the route.  Mixed in with these are long rows of tenement-houses well built of stone, with slate roofs, but with a grimy air of desolation about them that surely drives their occupants to drink.  To have a home a man must build it himself.  Forty houses in a row, all alike, are not homes at all.

I believe an observant man once wrote of the hand being subdued to what it works in.  The man who wrote that surely never tramped along the Haworth road as the bell rang for twelve o’clock.  From out the factories poured a motley mob of men, women and children, not only with hands dyed, but with clothing, faces and heads as well.  Girls with bright-green hair, and lemon-colored faces, leered and jeered at me as they hastened pellmell with hats askew, and stockings down, and dragging shawls, for home or public-house.  Red and maroon children ran, and bright-scarlet men smoked stolidly, taking their time with genuine grim Yorkshire sullen sourness.