MORNING WALK THROUGH A COAL DISTRICT.—RUABON.—AN OPTIMIST WITH
A WELSH WIFE.—GRAVEYARD NOTES.—A STAGE-WAGON.—TAXES.—WYNSTAY
PARK.—THOROUGH DRAINING.—A GLIMPSE OF COTTAGE LIFE.—“SIR WATKINS
WILLIAMS WYN.”
_June 4th._
[Sidenote: _COAL DISTRICT.—AN OPTIMIST._]
The most agreeable chimes, from the church tower, we had ever heard,
awoke us this morning at three o’clock. It is light enough here at that
time to read or write, and the twilight at evening does not seem to be
over at half-past ten. I felt very stiff and sore, but arose and wrote
till half-past six, when we got the bar-maid up, paid our bill (we were
charged only sixpence a piece for our lodging), and were let out into
the street; no signs that any one else in the town was yet stirring.
Our road ran through a coal district, tall chimneys throwing out long
black clouds of smoke, and pump-levers working along the hill-tops; the
road darkened with cinders; sooty men coming home from the night-work
to low, dirty, thatched cottages—the least interesting and poorest
farmed country we had yet travelled over. After walking six miles, we
stopped at the Talbot Inn, Ruabon, to breakfast.
In the tap-room, over his beer, was a middle-aged man, a currier
by trade, who told us he had come hither nine years ago from
Staffordshire, had married a nice Welsh girl, and settled himself very
comfortably. He said wages were good here, and it did not cost so much
to live as it used to. He had a cottage in the village; the landlord,
Sir Watkins Wyn, was an excellent man, and his agent was very kind to
poor people. He did not see any need of grumbling, and, for his part,
thought the world a pretty fair world.
After a good breakfast in a room adorned with sporting pictures and a
likeness of Sir Watkins Wyn, I returned to talk with him. When he had
work, his wages were six dollars a week, but just now he was out of
work. The rent of his cottage and four roods of land was one hundred
and twenty dollars, and Sir Watkins paid the poor-rates. Sir Watkins
was not very generally liked by his tenants, because he was not so
liberal with them as his father; but his father had been extravagant,
and run the estate deeply in debt, and he had need to be more
particular: and he was sure he was always very easy with poor folks. He
had had a deduction made on his rent more than once when the times were
hard with him, and this year the farmers all were allowed ten per cent.
of their rents because corn is so low.
I had told him I was from America, and he was asking me some questions
about it, when he suddenly stopped, fidgeted about a moment, and then,
looking at a woman coming across the street, said, with a laughing,
swaggering air, “There’s my wife coming; now you’ll see a specimen of a
Welsh girl!” His wife, a stout, hard-looking woman, walked briskly in,
stood up straight before him, folded her arms, and, in a deep, quiet,
determined way, gave him a regular _Caudling_. He tried for a while
to make a joke of it, and to appease her. “Come now, missus, don’t be
hard upon un’; sit ye down now, and take a pint; these gentlemen be
from Ameriky, and I talks with ’um about going there. Come now, how’d
thee like to go to Ameriky?” As we were thus introduced, she glanced
fiercely at us, and we retreated at once without the door. He tried
for a moment longer to brave her, and called loudly for another mug of
ale. She turned her head to the bar-maid, and said, “You’ll get no more
ale!” and the bar-maid minded her.
She said he had been there before, this morning, and when he began
drinking in the morning it was always the last of him for the day. He
whimpered out that he had come home and breakfast wasn’t ready, and he
hadn’t any thing else to do but to come back here. It _was_ ready, she
said, and he might have been looking for some work, and so on. In a few
minutes they went off arm in arm.
[Sidenote: _FREIGHT WAGONS._]
Opposite the inn was an old church and a graveyard. There were more
monkey-faces on the church, and two effigies in stone, of knights—the
forms of their bodies with shields, barely distinguishable, and their
faces entirely effaced. Many of the gravestones had inscriptions in
Welsh, and both here and at Wrexham I noticed the business of the
deceased person was given, as _John Johnes, Wheelright_; _William
Lloyd, Tanner_, _&c._ On a flat stone near the church, the following
was inscribed (letter for letter), probably by a Welsh stone-cutter
following an English order, given verbally—“_This his the end of the
vault._”
Returning from the church, we found the currier again drinking beer in
the tap-room, with a number of other men, a drunken set, that probably
had come passengers by a stage wagon that stood in the road. This was
an immense vehicle, of pre-railroad origin, like our Pennsylvania
wagons, but heavier and higher. It had a heavy freight of barrels,
cases, and small parcels, on the top of which, under the canvass hooped
cover, a few passengers were cheaply accommodated, there being a ladder
in the rear for them to ascend by. Behind one of the hind-wheels was a
roller, attached by chains on either side the wheel to the axle-tree,
so that if the wagon fell back any, it scotched it—a good idea for
heavy loads in a hilly country. There were six stout cart-horses to
draw it, and all in a line, the wheeler being in shafts. The driver
said he had a load of eight or ten tons, and drove three miles an hour
with it. He paid about sixteen dollars a year taxes for his horses,
and two dollars for a very ugly bull-dog that stood guard over the
establishment for more than an hour while he was refreshing himself in
the inn. At length we saw the whole company come out, and the wagon
started again, all very jolly; the currier and another man, with their
hands on each other’s shoulders, staggered across the street, singing
“Oh, Susannah!” At the churchyard gate both fell, rolled over and
embraced each other, once or twice tried ineffectually to get up, and
then both went to sleep there on the ground. No wonder the specimen
Welsh girl had a hard look.
[Illustration: THE STAGE WAGON]
After finishing our letters to send by the steamer, we visited Wynstay
Park. It is much more picturesque than Eaton, the ground being
diversified and the trees larger. The deer also were larger; a servant
told us there were fifteen hundred of them. The hall, which is a plain
building, was undergoing repairs.
We separated here for a few days, my friends wishing to see more
of Welsh scenery, and going to the vale of Llangollen (pronounced
Langothlan), while I had a letter I wished to deliver in another
direction.
[Sidenote: _THOROUGH DRAINING._]
The park was covered with lines of recently-made under-drains, and
I hunted over it in hopes to find men at work, that I might see the
manner in which they were constructed. Going to a pretty checkered
timber-house to make inquiries, I was so fortunate as to meet the
foreman of the draining operations, Mr. Green, an intelligent
Warwickshire man, who obligingly took me to a field a mile or two
distant, where he had thirty men at work. The soil was a gravelly
loam, with a little heavier subsoil. The drains were laid twenty-seven
feet apart, and dug three feet deep (ordinarily), and one foot wide
from top to bottom; in the middle of the bottom a groove was cut for
the pipe, so the top of it would be three feet from the surface. No
narrow tools were used, except to cut the grooves for the pipe. The
foreman said that though a man could work to much better advantage in a
wider-mouthed drain, the extra dirt to be moved compensated for it, and
made this plan the cheapest.
I thought then, and since, until I came to try it in gravelly and stony
land, that the work might be done much more rapidly with the long,
narrow tools described by Mr. Delafield,[21] making the bottom of the
drain only of the width of the pipe intended to be laid; but I find
these can only be used to advantage in free ground. The method here
described is probably the best for draining soils, where many stones
larger than a hen’s egg are to be met with.
[21] _Transactions N. Y. State Agricultural Soc._, 1848, p. 232.
Cylindrical pipes, of either one or one and a half inch bore, were
laid in the grooves at the bottom of the drain; _collars_, connecting
them, were only used in the loosest soils. The _mains_ were laid one
foot deeper than the collecting drains, and the pipes in them were from
two to six inches bore. No series of drains were run more than seventy
yards in length without a main, and all the mains emptied into an open
ditch at the lowest side of the field, which was made deep enough to
allow of a drop of one foot from the mouths of the pipes. Where such a
ditch was likely to _gully_, the sides were sloped and turfed.
I will hereafter give a chapter on the process of thorough draining
in its most approved British methods, with estimates of cost, and a
discussion of how far it may be profitably employed in the United
States. For Great Britain, it is the most important agricultural
improvement ever made, and it is hardly absurd to assert that its
general introduction during the last ten years has saved England from
a revolution; certainly it is of the greatest political and social
consequence to her; I trust, therefore, even my non-agricultural
readers will have some interest in the subject.
The wages of the men employed at this work averaged $2.25 a week; boys,
16 cents a day.
[Sidenote: _THE GOOD LANDLORD._]
Mr. Green sent a lad to guide me across the park to the road I wished
to take—a remarkably bright, amiable boy, with whom I had a pleasant
talk as he led me on by the most charming way, among the old oaks, and
through herds of deer. He could read and write, and knew something
of geography and arithmetic, having been instructed by the curate
of Ruabon, whom he seemed to have much loved. (I think he had died
lately.) He also spoke kindly of Sir Watkins and his lady, to whom his
father was shepherd, and said that all their servants and poor people
were much attached to them. Passing near the hall, I asked for some
water, and he took me into one of the servants’ cottages to get it.
There was an old woman rocking a cradle, and a young woman ironing
linen, both very neatly dressed, the furniture plain and meagre, but
every thing clean, and an appearance of a good deal of comfort about
the room.
While the repairs were being made upon the hall, the family lived
in a cottage completely embowered among trees and shrubs, which we
afterwards passed, and I had the honour of catching a glimpse, through
the foliage, of a form in a grey coat, which, I was assured, was the
good Sir Watkins himself.
Soon after leaving the park, I crossed the Esk by a very high stone
arch, built “by Sir Watkins,” as some ragged boys and girls, who were
employed in collecting for manure the horsedung that dropped upon the
road, informed me, and this was the last I heard of Sir Watkins.