We arrived in Kendal in good time, and stayed at the temperance hotel.  In the town we purchased two strong but rather rustic-looking umbrellas, without tassels or gold or silver handles—­for umbrellas in the rainy region of the “North Countrie” were wanted for use and not for ornament.  We found them quite an agreeable change from the overalls.  Of course we held them up skilfully, and as we thought almost scientifically, when walking in the rain, and it was astonishing how well they protected us when holding them towards the same side and angle as the falling rain.  Many people we met were holding them straight up, and looking quite happy, reminding us of the ostrich when hunted and hard pressed, hiding its head in the sand and imagining that its body was covered also!  The draper who sold us the umbrellas told us that Professor Kirk, whom we had heard in Edinburgh, was to deliver an address in the evening on the Good Templar Movement, so we decided to attend.  The Professor, a good speaker, informed us that there were between five and six hundred members of the Order in Kendal.  Mr. Edward Dawson of Lancaster also addressed the meeting, and told us there were about three hundred members in Lancaster, while the Professor estimated the number in Scotland at between fifty and sixty thousand.  It was quite a new movement, which had its origin apparently in America, and was becoming the prevailing subject of conversation in the country we travelled through.

[Illustration:  KENDAL CASTLE.]

Kendal was an ancient place, having been made a market town by licence from Richard Coeur de Lion.  Philippa, the Queen of Edward III, wisely invited some Flemings to settle there and establish the manufacture of woollen cloth, which they did.  Robin Hood and his “merrie men” were said to have been clothed in Kendal Green, a kind of leafy green which made the wearers of it scarcely distinguishable from the foliage and vegetation of the forests which in Robin Hood’s time covered the greater part of the country.  Lincoln Green was an older cloth of pure English manufacture.

Robin Hood was the outlawed Earl of Huntingdon, and Shakespeare makes Falstaff say—­

    All the woods
  Are full of outlaws that in Kendal Green
  Followed the outlawed Earl of Huntingdon.

Catherine Parr was born at Kendal, and an old writer, noting that she was the last Queen of Henry VIII, added, “a lady who had the good fortune to descend to the grave with her head on, in all probability merely by outliving her tyrant.”  This beautiful and highly accomplished woman had already been married twice, and after the King’s death took a fourth husband.  She narrowly escaped being burnt, for the King had already signed her death-warrant and delivered it to the Lord Chancellor, who dropped it by accident, and the person who found it carried it to the Queen herself.  She was actually in conversation with the King when the Lord Chancellor came to take her to the Tower, for which the King called him a knave and a fool, bidding him “Avaunt from my presence.”  The Queen interceded for the Chancellor; but the King said, “Ah, poor soul, thou little knowest what he came about; of my word, sweetheart, he has been to thee a very knave.”