[Illustration:  JAMES BRINDLEY.]

When the water was first turned into the canal, Brindley mysteriously disappeared, and was nowhere to be found; but as the canal when full did not burst its embankments, as he had feared, he soon reappeared and was afterwards employed to construct even more difficult canals.  He died in 1772, and was buried in Harriseahead Churchyard on the Cheshire border of Staffordshire.  It is computed that he engineered as many miles of canals as there are days in the year.

[Illustration:  THE BOTTOM LOCKS AT RUNCORN.]

It must have been a regular custom for the parsons in Derbyshire to keep diaries in the eighteenth century, for the Vicar of Wormhill kept one, like the Vicar of Castleton, both chancing to be members of the Bagshawe family, a common name in that neighbourhood.  He was a hard-working and conscientious man, and made the following entry in it on February 3rd, 1798

Sunday.—­Preached at Wormhill on the vanity of human pursuits and human pleasures, to a polite audience, an affecting sermon.  Rode in the evening to Castleton, where I read three discourses by Secker.  In the forest I was sorry to observe a party of boys playing at Football.  I spoke to them but was laughed at, and on my departure one of the boys gave the football a wonderful kick—­a proof this of the degeneracy of human nature!

On reaching Miller’s Dale, a romantic deep hollow in the limestone, at the bottom of which winds the fast-flowing Wye, my brother declared that he felt more at home, as it happened to be the only place he had seen since leaving John o’ Groat’s that he had previously visited, and it reminded him of a rather amusing incident.

[Illustration:  THE BRIDGEWATER CANAL—­WHERE IT ENTERS THE MINES AT WORSLEY.]

Our uncle, a civil engineer in London, had been over on a visit, and was wearing a white top-hat, then becoming fashionable, and as my brother thought that a similar hat would just suit the dark blue velveteen coat he wore on Sundays, he soon appeared in the prevailing fashion.  He was walking from Ambergate to Buxton, and had reached Miller’s Dale about noon, just as the millers were leaving the flour mills for dinner.  One would have thought that the sight of a white hat would have delighted the millers, but as these hats were rather dear, and beyond the financial reach of the man in the street, they had become an object of derision to those who could not afford to wear them, the music-hall answer to the question “Who stole the donkey?” being at that time “The man with the white hat!”

He had met one group of the millers coming up the hill and another lot was following, when a man in the first group suddenly turned round and shouted to a man in the second group, “I say, Jack, who stole the donkey?” But Jack had not yet passed my brother, and, as he had still to face him, he dared not give the customary answer, so, instead of replying “The man with the white hat,” he called out in the Derbyshire dialect, with a broad grin on his face, “Th’ feyther.”  A roar of laughter both behind and in front, in which my brother heartily joined, followed this repartee.