“The Speech of Samuel Horrocks, Esquire, M.P., in the British House of Commons! one penny,” which they continued to repeat.

“Eh! owd Sammy’s bin makkin’ a speech,” and a rush was made for the papers.  The streets were poorly lighted in those days, and the men did a roaring business in the dark.  One man, however, was so anxious to read the speech that he could not wait until he got home, but went to a shop window, where there was a light, but the paper was blank.  Thinking they had given him the wrong paper, he ran after the men and shouted, pointing to the paper, “Hey, there’s nowt on it.”  “Well,” growled one of the men, “he said nowt.”

[Illustration:  CHATSWORTH HOUSE.]

We now climbed up the opposite side of the dale, and continued on the moorland road for a few miles, calling at the “Flagg Moor Inn” for tea.  By the time we had finished it was quite dark, and the landlady of the inn did her best to persuade us to stay there for the night, telling us that the road from there to Ashbourne was so lonely that it was possible on a dark night to walk the whole distance of fourteen miles without seeing a single person, and as it had been the Great Fair at Newhaven that day, there might be some dangerous characters on the roads.  When she saw we were determined to proceed farther, she warned us that the road did not pass through any village, and that there was only a solitary house here and there, some of them being a little way from the road.  The road was quite straight, and had a stone wall on each side all the way, so all we had got to do was to keep straight on, and to mind we did not turn to the right or the left along any of the by-roads lest we should get lost on the moors.  It was not without some feeling of regret that we bade the landlady “Good night” and started out from the comfortable inn on a pitch-dark night.  Fortunately the road was dry, and, as there were no trees, the limestone of which it was composed showed a white track easily discernible in the inky darkness which surrounded it.  As we got farther on our way we could see right in front a great illumination in the mist or clouds above marking the glare from the country fair at Newhaven, which was only four miles from the inn we had just left.  We met quite a number of people returning from the fair, both on foot and in vehicles, and as they all appeared to be in good spirits we received a friendly greeting from all who spoke to us.  Presently arriving at Newhaven itself, which consisted solely of one large inn, we found the surrounding open space packed with a noisy and jovial crowd of people, the number of whom absolutely astonished us, as the country around appeared so desolate, and we wondered where they all could have come from.  Newhaven, which had been a very important place in the coaching-days, was a big three-storeyed house with twenty-five bedrooms and stabling for a hundred horses.  It stood at a junction of roads about 1,100 feet above