Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 1.djvu/34

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26

��MANUFACTURING AT MANCHESTER.

��when you find parallel cases just as sur- prising and romantic with the historian. The lady falls in love with the page, or her father's secretary, which is all the same, and the miss with the music-mas- ter, or the messieur who gives twelve les- sons in the French ; the bachelor uncle with the housekeeper, though he has riches and poor relations in abundance; or the hostler with the bar-maid, who treats him to gin and water on the sly ; — and, pray, why should it be out of place with the widow of a wealthy brewer to fall in love with the handsome and ambi- tious attorney she employs.

It is all the work of association, we say, if the affinities be right — in proof of which, let me add, that the widow of the brewer did fall in love with Hyde, the attorney, which was all proper and busi- ness-like, and to work up the usual, or, rather, unusual climax of this affair, Hyde, who regarded the widow's fortune as a matter too substantial to be trifled with, readily followed suit, — loved, pro- posed, and was accepted.

"Hold!" says the discriminating reader. "This is no romance, my dear sir; it smacks too much of the metalic ring of financial cleverness."

True, gentle reader, it is difficult to rid ourselves of the old impression of " love in a cottage," princely adventurers in the garb of troubadours, and similar dear old moonshine that leaves its impression on

��the dreamy and poetic spirit of our own most mattei - -of-fact age — at least when compared to the romance of our present matter-of-fact narration.

But the world of the real is not less stereotyped in representation than the world of the ideal — it is all the same yes- terday, to-day, and forever.

Circumstances may modify passion, re- fine intellect, purify thought ; but, in re- ality, human nature remains the same in Botany Bay, China, or the antipodes. Twenty years ago we remember to have seen Miss McCrae murdered in statuary, and the other day we saw her again, a little faded it is true, as naturally might be expected, after constantly undergoing the process of being murdered for so long a period, by a malicious savage in red daub and feathers ; and as you look back, are you not morally satisfied she is the same unfortunate lady, of the same iden- tical plaster and wax that your grand- father saw, and that your grandson is positively certain to see, and to regard with the same admiration and awe that you yourself once regarded it?

Suffice it to say, or rather let it be suf- ficient to add, that the lawyer and the brewer's widow were married, and that Hyde, afterwards the great Earl of Clar- endon, by issue of this marriage, became father-in-law to James II., so that the poor tub-woman was the true mother of the queen mother of Mary and Anne.

��HISTORY AND PRESENT CONDITION OF MANUFACTURING AT THE

CITY OF MANCHESTER.

��The territory upon which the city of Manchester is located was first settled about the year 1730, by Scotch-Irish, who emigrated from the north of Ireland in 1719, and with others established the colony of Lon- donderry. Among these settlers was Archibald Stark, the father of Gen. John Stark of Revolutionary fame. The territory which was incorpo- rated as a town by the name of Der-

��ryfield in 1751, consisted of a por- tion of the south-west part of Ches- ter, a part of the north-west portion of Londonderry and an ungranted tract of land called Hurrytown, about thirty-five square miles in all. Am- oskeag Falls in the Merrimack at this point was a great fishing place and vast quantities of salmon, shad, alewives, lamprey eels, &c. were taken. The Pennacook Indians had

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