on the lawn in a kind of convulsion.  It took them some time to recover their equilibrium, during which the Hall door remained open, and a portion of the band had already begun to move away in despair, when they were called back by the old butler appearing at the Hall door with a silver tray in his hand.  The collector’s services were again requisitioned, and he returned with the magnificent sum of one shilling!  As most of the farmers had given five shillings and the remainder half a crown, the squire’s reputation for generosity had been fully maintained.  One verse of “God save the Queen,” instead of the usual three, was played by the way of acknowledgment, and so ended the band’s busking season in the year 1863.

We quite enjoyed our visit to Tideswell, and were rather loath to leave the friendly company at the “George Inn,” who were greatly interested in our walk, several musical members watching our departure as the ostler loaded my brother with the luggage.

Tideswell possessed a poet named Beebe Eyre, who in 1854 was awarded L50 out of the Queen’s Royal Bounty, which probably inspired him to write: 

  Tideswell! thou art my natal spot,
    And hence I love thee well;
  May prosperous days now be the lot
    Of all that in thee dwell!

The sentiments expressed by the poet coincided with our own.  As we departed from the town we observed a curiosity in the shape of a very old and extremely dilapidated building, which we were informed could neither be repaired, pulled down, nor sold because it belonged to some charity.

On the moors outside the town there were some more curious remains of the Romans and others skilled in mining, which we thought would greatly interest antiquarians, as they displayed more methods of mining than at other places we had visited.  A stream had evidently disappointed them by filtering through its bed of limestone, but this they had prevented by forming a course of pebbles and cement, which ran right through Tideswell, and served the double purpose of a water supply and a sewer.

We crossed the old “Rakes,” or lines, where the Romans simply dug out the ore and threw up the rubbish, which still remained in long lines.  Clever though they were, they only knew lead when it occurred in the form known as galena, which looked like lead itself, and so they threw out a more valuable ore, cerusite, or lead carbonate, and the heaps of this valuable material were mined over a second time in comparatively recent times.  The miner of the Middle Ages made many soughs to drain away the water from the mines, and we saw more of the tunnels that had been made to draw air to the furnaces when wood was used for smelting the lead.

The forest, like many others, had disappeared, and Anna Seward had exactly described the country we were passing through when she wrote: 

  The long lone tracks of Tideswell’s native moor,
  Stretched on vast hills that far and near prevail. 
  Bleak, stony, bare, monotonous, and pale.