spread over the country, but on their return never crossed into Staffordshire, for, as the story goes, the old women of the Woodlands of Needwood Forest undertook to find how things were going, and crept down to the bridges of Sudbury and Scropton.  As it began to rain, they used their red flannel petticoats as cloaks, which the Highlanders, spying, took to be the red uniforms of soldiers, and a panic seized them—­so much so, that some who had seized some pig-puddings and were fastening them hot on a pole, according to a local ditty, ran out through a back door, and, jumping from a heap of manure, fell up to the neck in a cesspool.  The pillage near Ashbourne was very great, but they could not stay, for the Duke was already at Uttoxoter with a small force.

[Illustration:  ASHBOURNE CHURCH.]

George Canning, the great orator who was born in 1770 and died when he was Prime Minister of England in 1827, often visited Ashbourne Old Hall.  In his time the town of Ashbourne was a flourishing one; it was said to be the only town in England that benefited by the French prisoners of war, as there were 200 officers, including three generals, quartered there in 1804, and it was estimated that they spent nearly L30,000 in Ashbourne.  An omnibus was then running between Ashbourne and Derby, which out of courtesy to the French was named a “diligence,” the French equivalent for stage-coach; but the Derby diligence was soon abbreviated to the Derby “Dilly.”  The roads at that time were very rough, macadamised surfaces being unknown, and a very steep hill leading into the Ashbourne and Derby Road was called bete noire by the French, about which Canning, who was an occasional passenger, wrote the following lines: 

  So down the hill, romantic Ashbourne, glides
  The Derby Dilly, carrying three insides;
  One in each corner sits and lolls at ease,
  With folded arms, propt back and outstretched knees;
  While the pressed bodkin, pinched and squeezed to death,
  Sweats in the midmost place and scolds and pants for breath.

We were now at the end of the last spur of the Pennine Range of hills and in the last town in Derbyshire.  As if to own allegiance to its own county, the spire of the parish church, which was 212 feet high, claimed to be the “Pride of the Peak.”  In the thirteenth-century church beneath it, dedicated to St. Oswald, there were many fine tombs of the former owners of the Old Hall at Ashbourne, those belonging to the Cockayne family being splendid examples of the sculptor’s art.  We noted that one member of the family was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1404, while another had been knighted by King Henry VII at the siege of Tournay.  The finest object in the church was the marble figure of a little child as she appeared—­

  Before Decay’s effacing fingers
  Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,

which for simplicity, elegance, and childlike innocence of face was said to be the most interesting and pathetic monument in England.  It is reputed to be the masterpiece of the English sculptor Thomas Banks, whose work was almost entirely executed abroad, where he was better known than in England.  The inscriptions on it were in four different languages, English, Italian, French, and Latin, that in English being: