head; such vagrants were no fit objects for his charity.

Linda desisted very soon. 'I wonder what they call this place. The people are evidently barbarians with no feeling for art. Put up your violin, child. A freak is very well in its way, but we are not a hundred miles from Bleiburg, and now I think of it, what would the professors say if they, saw us masquerading as street musicians?'

It had seemed better than begging, but had turned out less remunerative.

Night was closing fast. The houses were shutting up, the lights extinguished. The last saunterers in the streets eyed the two girls with surprise and suspicion. Linda took fright.

'They will think we are gipsies, or worse, thieves and vagabonds, and lock us up,' she said, shuddering; and she hurried Laurence away from the streets and the high road, taking at random a side path leading into the hills, overhanging a solitary valley. Here they were alone, under the summer moon, and halted, breathless, looking down on the river and the slate roofs of the little town beneath.

A ruin crowned the hill, a red

round tower lifted its head, the broken walls and arches at its base were half buried by the overgrowth of grass. The girls sought shelter here. There was no dew, it was a warm night; they explored the nooks and corners of the ruin, and chose the best resting place it offered.

'I have always wanted to know what sleeping in the open air was like,' said Linda. If it had not been for this adventure I should never have made the experience. Upon my word, this old sunken chapel makes a very good lodging, and the owls and bats won't make any charge.'

The moon rays peeped through the loop-holes of the red tower. The moon goddess, surprised, smiled and watched over the sleep of the wanderers: Linda, a little rosebud, sunk in the rosebud sleep of youth and health (she had carefully appropriated the bag for a pillow, and the shawls for a counterpane), and Laurence accommodating herself with a bed of grass and twigs, with her head on her violin-case, unable to sleep, half from a strange delight in the fantastic situation, half from a throbbing eagerness of expectation concerning the fate she was going to meet on the morrow.

ON a bleak and rugged height, eleven hundred feet above the level of the sea, stands the thriving manufacturing village of Queensbury. It is a village on a mountain-top, exposed to all the winds that blow, and commanding vast views of the surrounding country, including in the prospect the busy smoke-hued towns of Halifax and Bradford, their forests of towering factory chimneys, and the farstretching hills and dales which intervene. Seventy years ago Queensbury was a remote and not easily accessible hamlet of some two hundred inhabitants; to-day it is a great industrial colony, with a population of about eight thousand persons. Seventy years ago it was known to mail-coach travellers as a welcome haltingplace, where, after a long and toilsome climb with panting horses, they were enabled to procure rest and warmth and refreshment before dropping down into the valley on the other side. The name of this lonely roadside hostelry, where the horses baited and the travellers rested and regaled, was the Queen's Head, and it was by no other name than Queen's Head that the village was known down to the year 1863, when it declined any longer to be satisfied with a public-house signboard for a name, and proclaimed itself to the world, formally, seriously, and irrevocably, as Queensbury, and by that name it has been known ever since. It was in the Queen Anne period that the Queen's Head inn was instituted; prior to that the

little cluster of one-storied tenements, which stood perched there on the hill-top, had been known by the primitive name of Causewayend. Up to that particular turning-point of the road, it is safe to presume, there had existed on the Bradford side of the hill some semblance of a civilised road, and a causeway for foot-passengers; but it had not been considered necessary to continue the causeway beyond these few cottages; hence the name Causewayend, or, according to the customary vernacular definition, t' Caus'a' End.'

The hardy, vigorous, plainspoken Yorkshiremen who settled in this lofty region did not trouble themselves to think out euphonious or high-sounding names for the odd nooks and corners of the hill-side, which gradually became peopled as the locality developed into a manufacturing district. Spades were spades to them, and they christened their dwellinggrounds, homesteads, and landmarks in conformity with their physical peculiarities or their special associations. For instance, there was Scarlet Heights, where local tradition said there had been a sanguinary fray between contending factions in the time of the Wars of the Roses. A field in the same vicinity was called Bloody Ing, and a block of houses subsequently built thereon was styled Bloody Row. Then there was Nave-lane (since corrupted into Knave-lane), which obtained its title from the fact that no

vehicle could plough through its quagmires and bogs without sinking to the nave of its wheels. Blackdike, Blackmires, Blackshaw, Swamp, and Harrowins are amongst the other distinctive appellations which attach to localities in and around Queensbury, and they sufficiently indicate the original nature of this half-mountain, half-moorland district. In some few instances, however, the natives have indulged in something more than a mere descriptive appellation, and have selected titles which bring into strange relationship the names of the countries and cities of far-off lands. Thus we find such places as Greenland and Van Diemen's Land in close contiguity to Queensbury; and at Thornton, a mile or two away, we may walk from Moscow to Egypt, from Egypt to Jerusalem, and thence to the World's End, in a very short space of time.

In no part of Yorkshire was there to be found, at the beginning of the present century, more originality and vigour of character than amongst these hardy northerners; and it was amidst such scenes and people that John Foster, the founder of the worsted industry of Queensbury, was born and reared. John Foster was the son of Mr. Jonas Foster, and was born in the township of Thornton, the place which gave birth to Charlotte Brontë. Mr. Jonas Foster was a farmer and colliery owner, and lived on his own farm at Moor Royd Gate. He was descended from an ancient line of yeomen whose names had long been prominent in the annals of Thornton, and his circumstances were such as to enable him to give his son what would be considered at that time a moderately good education. John Foster was born on the 20th of January 1798, and received his earliest educational

training at the Thornton Grammar School, an institution which had been founded and endowed in 1672 'for the maintenance of a schoolmaster to teach Latin and English.' How much of Latin or of English was drilled into the future manufacturer prince at this school it is difficult to say; but, after a time, his father considered it well to take him away from the school, and give him the opportunity of exercising his mind in business pursuits. John Foster employed himself with great energy in the work of his father's farm and mines, and early and late was to be found plodding away persistently and methodically in the rural occupations to which he was directed. But his father was anxious that he should not give himself up entirely to business as yet, although he had always destined him, in his own mind, for a commercial career. So, after allowing John to follow his bent for a while on the farm, he sent him to Brookhouse School, near Ovenden, and there the young man may be said to have completed his education. It was while at this school that he made the acquaintance of Mr. Jonathan Akroyd of Halifax, who afterwards became the founder of another of the largest manufacturing concerns in the West Riding; and it is not improbable that the friendship that was then engendered between two congenial minds acted as an incentive to both to undertake those business enterprises which ultimately brought them fame and fortune. They were both Yorkshiremen of the truest type, wont to look upon life in that self-reliant manly spirit which recognises the necessity to fight and conquer, but scorns to stoop to low devices for the achievement of its ends. They appreciated to the full the dignity of labour; and it is pleasant to

think of these two kindred spirits, with their high aims and active brains, looking out together upon the future, and resolving, dreaming, and planning as to what they would create for themselves out of it. After leaving Brookhouse. School, John Foster set himself to learn the art and mystery of the worsted manufacture; and so diligently and successfully did he apply himself in this direction, that by the time he came of age, in 1819, he was able to establish a worsted business of his own at Low Fold, near Queensbury. In the same year he took a further means of settling himself in life by marrying the daughter of Mr. Abram Briggs. In this estimable lady Mr. Foster found a helpmeet in the truest sense of the word, and from that time forward, both in his domestic and in his business relations, he seems to have been peculiarly fortunate.

The worsted manufacture was at this period just beginning to show signs of that vigorous development which, thanks to the energy, foresight, and directness of purpose of such pioneers as Mr. Foster, subsequently attended it. The country was fast recovering from the trade-crippling effects of the wars with Napoleon, and, what with the increasing power of mechanical invention and the growing confidence of capitalists, an era of industrial prosperity appeared to be at last an actual realisation. Mr. Foster was one of the first to take advantage of this improved state of things; and in hundreds of cottages on the remote hill-top in and around Queensbury there was to be heard from morn to night the sound of busy looms, engaged in making the worsted pieces which Mr. Foster found a ready market for in Bradford and Halifax. In course of time, Mr. Foster became

the largest employer of hand-loom labour in the district, and for certain special fabrics he acquired a considerable reputation. The goods chiefly manufactured by him were lastings and damasks. The former were, as their name implies, textiles of a very strong description, hardy, stout, and sturdy, like the people who were engaged in producing them.

The next landmark in Mr. Foster's career was the building of Prospect House at Queensbury, a substantial mansion which he erected in 1827, and resided in continuously for the greater part of his life. Prospect House not only added dignity to the Queensbury landscape, but served to indicate that the young manufacturer had reached a point of success which was in advance of anything that had been achieved in that locality before. To the people around it would then seem that Mr. Foster had attained the height of his prosperity; whereas, as it subsequently turned out, he was yet only on the very threshold of his commercial career. Already he had made what in those days would be considered a fortune, despite the remoteness of the locality wherein he had pitched his tent, and the frequent periods of depression which occurred in those days; but he was still young, and had a family of sons and daughters growing up around him, and the more success he won the more he desired. The ambition of a man of business, fortunately, has no limit, and Mr. Foster plodded on year after year with unwearying industry, adapting himself always to the demands and necessities of the time, and securing for himself a foothold in the commercial world from which he was not to be dislodged. By 1832 his operations had expanded to such a degree that he found him

self compelled to look out for additional business quarters; so he became the tenant of Cannon Mill, a large new factory situated at Great Horton, a village midway between Queensbury and Bradford, and there he carried on for some time the main portion of his spinning business. Three years later Mr. Foster was prompted to build a mill of his own at Blackdike, the site of a farmstead at Queensbury, which had been in his wife's family since the year 1779. He was mainly his own architect in this project as in everything else; he had the factory built according to his own plans, and superintended the erection thereof down to the minutest detail, insisting always, in the spirit of the true economist, upon being supplied with the best materials and the best workmanship. Many people regarded the erection of this factory-now called the Old Mill, and forming but a very small portion of the Blackdike Works-as a wild and reckless investment of capital; but those who best understood Mr. Foster's character and appreciated his shrewdness and clear business instincts were far from predicting failure for the undertaking. In due time the mill was completed; and soon there were from 3000 to 4000 spindles at work there, turning out yarn at the rate of 1200 gross per week, a quantity which, at that day and in that locality, was looked upon as something prodigious. Not the most sanguine expectations of the founder of the Blackdike Works, however, could have forecast the magnitude to which these works were ultimately destined to grow. If the local pessimists of that day could have been privileged to have dipped into the future to the extent of some quarter of a century, they would have seen such a dis

persion of cloud and shadow from their vision as would have almost made them believers in the truth of the old-world legends of magic and sorcery. They would have seen then (as many of them lived to see afterwards) that first Queensbury mill hemmed in on all sides by newer mills, each of them of far greater dimensions than the original factory, and of much superior architectural formation; they would have seen gigantic piles of warehouses, a long range of palatial offices, immense reservoirs, and extensive machineshops, containing altogether no less than thirteen acres of flooring; in place of the 3000 to 4000 spindles they would have seen 50,000, capable of producing 12,000 gross of yarn per week; and in addition to the spinning they would have seen the processes of woolcombing and of weaving-indeed, all the operations connected with the production of worsted pieces-carried on upon a stupendous scale in this one con

cern.

The time it took to accomplish all this was very short. Messrs. Foster's establishment developed with all the rapidity of an American city, and their original competitors in trade were soon outdistanced. It is related of one of Mr. Foster's neighbours, a gentleman who aspired to keep abreast with Mr. Foster in the race for commercial honours, that when he saw the Blackdike factory rising in frowning obtrusion near his own property, he built a great wall to shut the building from view, and declined to allow Mr. Foster to become the purchaser of the land. This gentleman, however, belonged to the old school, while Mr. Foster was essentially a leader of the new school; it is not surprising, therefore, that the latter soon got ahead of the for