IV. What the young ladies, old ladies, and middle aged-ladies are
practically doing with the blessed fields and mountains of their native
land, the next letter very accurately shows. For the sake of fine
dresses they let their fathers and brothers invest in any Devil’s
business they can steal the poor’s labour by, or destroy the poor’s
gardens by; pre-eminently, and of all Devil’s businesses, in rushing
from place to place, as the Gennesaret swine. And see here what comes
of it.
A gentleman told me the other night that trade, chiefly in cotton from
India, was going back to Venice. One can’t help being sorry—not for our
sake, but Venice’s—when one sees what commercial prosperity means now.
There was a lovely picture of Cox’s of Dollwydellan (I don’t think it’s
spelt right) at the Club. All the artists paint the Slidr valley; and
do you know what is being done to it? It’s far worse than a railway to
Ambleside or Grasmere, because those places are overrun already; but
Dollwydellan is such a quiet out-of-the-way corner, and no one in the
world will be any the better for a railway there. I went about two
months ago, when I was getting better from my first illness; but all my
pleasure in the place was spoiled by the railway they are making from
Betwys. It is really melancholy to see the havoc it makes. Of course no
one cares, and they crash, and cut, and destroy, like utter barbarians,
as they are. Through the sweetest, wildest little glens, the line is
cleared—rocks are blasted for it, trees lie cut—anything and everything
is sacrificed—and for what? The tourists will see nothing if they go in
the train; the few people who go down to Betwys or Llanwrst to market,
will perhaps go oftener, and so spend more money in the end, and
Dollwydellan will get some more people to lodge there in the summer,
and prices will go up. [11] In the little village, a hideous ‘traction
engine’ snorted and puffed out clouds of black smoke, in the mornings,
and then set off crunching up and down the roads, to carry coals for
the works, I think; but I never in my life saw anything more
incongruous than that great black monster getting its pipes filled at a
little spring in the village, while the lads all stood gaping round.
The poor little clergyman told us his village had got sadly corrupted
since the navvies came into it; and when he pointed out to us a pretty
old stone bridge that was being pulled down for the railway, he said,
“Yes, I shall miss that, very much;” but he would not allow that things
so orthodox as railways could be bad on the whole. I never intended,
when I began, to trouble you with all this, but Cox’s picture set me
off, and it really is a great wrong that any set of men can take
possession of one of the few peaceful spots left in England, and hash
it up like that. Fancy driving along the road up the Slidr valleys and
seeing on boards a notice, to “beware when the horn was blowing,” and
every now and then hearing a great blasting, smoke, and rocks crashing
down. Well, you know just as well as I how horrible it all is. Only I
can’t think why people sit still, and let the beautiful places be
destroyed.
The owners of that property,—I forget their name, but they had
monuments in the little old church,—never live there, having another
‘place’ in Scotland,—so of course they don’t care. [12]
V. A fragment to illustrate the probable advantage of sulphurous air,
and articles, in the country.
I did not think to tell you, when speaking of the fatality of broken
limbs in our little dressmaker and her family, that when in St.
Thomas’s Hospital with a broken thigh, the doctors said in all
probability the tenderness of her bones was owing to the manufacture of
sulphur by her mother’s grandfather. Dr. Simon knows her family through
operating on the brother of our dressmaker, and often gave them kindly
words at the hospital.
I am, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully.