Kelsey

“ It had been arranged that George should go into the business in which Lady Kelsey still had a large interest. Lucy wanted him to make great sums of money, so that he might pay his father's debts, and perhaps buy back the house which her family had owned so long.
'I want him to be a clever man of business—since business is the only thing open to him now—and an excellent sportsman.'
She was too shy to describe her ambition, but her fancy had already cast a glow over the calling which George was to adopt. ”

“ Miss Kelsey laughed in high delight. “Oh, how perfectly ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “Albert—Mr. Speranza, I mean—this is my friend Miss Madeline Fosdick. She is from New York and she has decided to spend her summers in South Harniss—which I consider very good judgment. Her father is going to build a cottage for her to spend them in down on the Bay Road on the hill at the corner above the Inlet. ”

“ Dick.
And if he hasn't, it's death you're sending him to?
Alec.
Yes. It's death!
END OF THE SECOND ACT
THE THIRD ACT Scene: A smoking-room at Lady Kelsey's, leading by an archway into a drawing-room at the back. On the right is a glass door which leads into the garden. On one side is a sofa; on the other a table with cigarettes, matches, whiskey, sodas, etc.
Lady Kelsey is giving a dance, and the music of the Lancers is heard vaguely from the ball-room as the curtain rises. Mrs. Crowley and Sir Robert Boulger are sitting down. Lady Kelsey comes in with the Rev. James Carbery. ”

“ They had a tent in which they lived until they could clear ground and build a log house. This was located on the Cherokee Trace about a mile north of the present city limits of Gilmer, on what is now known at the Walter Barnwell farm.
Captain Hart had left the mountains of his native eastern Tennessee to follow his sweetheart, Miss Evaline Kelsey, to Marshall, Texas, where her father, Dr. W. H. Kelsey, was a physician, merchant, and Methodist preacher. So much like his native hills did he find the country, it was easy for him to quickly feel at home and to love his new surroundings. ”

“ And a queer lot they were who listened, and a queer lot they had to be, to enjoy Kelsey's confidence. “Men are like books,” he would often say to Felix. “It is their insides I care for, no matter how badly they are bound. The half-calf or all-morocco sort never appeal to me. Shelf fellows seldom handled, I call them, and a man who is not handled and rubbed up against, with a corner worn off here and there, is like a book kept under glass. ”

“ The admirable foster-mother, brooking no interference with her system, improved him into a well-behaved child, as well as the healthiest and most beautiful in all that countryside. It was a standing grievance at Redford that she would not allow him to be always on show there, subject to Mary's indulgence, and Deb's caprices, and the temptations of the housekeeper's store-room. Only Mr Kelsey, who was his idol, was permitted to withdraw him from Mrs Kelsey's eye. ”

“ Alas! that dreams so often prove untrue.
CHAPTER X. THE ENGAGEMENT, REAL AND PROSPECTIVE.
To her niece Mrs. Kelsey had communicated the result of her interview with J.C., and that young lady had fallen into a violent passion, which merged itself at last into a flood of tears, and ended finally in strong hysterics. While in this latter condition Mrs. Kelsey deemed it necessary to summon her brother, to whom she narrated the circumstances of Nellie's illness. To say that the doctor was angry would but feebly express the nature of his feelings. ”

“ Now a stranger might think that in so small a community it would be difficult to find embodied in one person all the necessary attributes. But such was not the case. There was George Kelsey; if you had a thousand to select from, you could not find a better man. First, his great round tent, standing in the business centre, cool and pleasant by day and well lighted at night, would serve splendidly as a courthouse. True, the clarion note of justice might sometimes be drowned by the clinking of coin and the rattling of glasses ”

“ Every general sends out spies to bring him information which he could not get in any other way, and although we are not generals we are good and loyal Confederates, and what’s the reason we can’t do the same? Have you thought of anybody?”
“There’s Kelsey, for one.”
“Great Scott, man! He won’t do. Beardsley, Shelby, and a few others offered Kelsey money to find out whether Marcy and his mother were Union or Confederate, and tried to have him employed on that plantation as overseer after Hanson was spirited away, so that he could find out if there was any money in the house ”

“ In one of the earliest chapters of this book you have read of the 'making of Cheshire'. We have brought the story of Cheshire down to the present day, but Cheshire is not yet 'made'. Many and wonderful changes there have been since our ancestors shot wild beasts with their flinty arrow-heads, and devoured raw flesh in the pits and caverns of Alderley Edge. The people of Cheshire, who have struggled through long centuries to win for themselves light and liberty, have never turned their faces backwards. With steadfast purpose and unfaltering steps they march forward on the way of progress. ”

“ Alec wondered whether his opinion of the affair would be that of the majority. He thought Alec should shoot himself?
'I can see myself doing it,' Alec muttered.
XV
A few hours later Lady Kelsey's dance was in full swing, and to all appearances it was a great success. Many people were there, and everyone seemed to enjoy himself. On the surface, at all events, there was nothing to show that anything had occurred to disturb the evening's pleasure, and for most of the party the letter in the Daily Mail was no more than a welcome topic of conversation. ”

“ He was a very practical man, and gained his knowledge not from books but from his own experiments. When he was called to186 the House of Commons to explain his scheme for carrying a canal over the Mersey, which many people laughed at as absurd, he took with him a Cheshire cheese which he cut in halves to represent the arches of the bridge, and made a complete model of his proposed work which greatly amused his audience, and at the same time proved that he was well able to overcome his difficulties. ”

“ Few of them stayed at home for any length of time, and when they returned, they generally found that some score had to be settled with the Welshmen, who had been making havoc of their lands during their absence. So that whether at home or abroad, fighting was always their chief business.
Cheshire has been called the 'seed-plot of gentility'. The Cheshire gentry prided themselves on marrying within their own county. A Cheshire proverb says: ''Tis better to wed over the mixen than over the moor,' meaning the moorland that separates Cheshire from her neighbours. ”

“ O'Day, that Polly Codman will be drivin' through Central Park in her carriage before five years is out; and she deserves it, for there ain't a finer woman from here to the Battery.”
“I am quite sure of it, Mistress Kitty. That is where the American comes in—or, perhaps it is the New Yorker. I have not been here long enough to find out.”
Of all these neighbors, however, it was Timothy Kelsey, the hunchback, largely because of his misfortunes and especially because of his vivid contrast to all the others, who appealed to him most. ”

“ Its geographical position has thus made it a meeting-place of nations, and you will see in later chapters that all the peoples that have helped to make our national history have in turn realized the importance of its position, and have fought desperately for its possession. Briton and Roman, Angle and Saxon and Dane, Welsh and Norman have all left some mark of their presence in the county, and from these many elements is derived the blood that flows in the veins of nearly all Cheshire boys and girls of to-day. ”

“ Now, Patty had been trying during all of the previous dialogue to think if there was not something that her mother might possibly want her to do after school, by which she might escape the sweeping, but all in vain, for Patty’s mother was one of the women who “never want children bothering around about the work,” and as Patty was too conscientious to invent an excuse, as some children would have done, she had no answer for Miss Kelsey’s question except a rather sulky, “Nothing that I know of, ma’am.” ”

“ He entertained Henry the Second at Chester Castle when Henry made an expedition against the Welsh, the troops encamping on Saltney marshes. Henry the Second had high views of the duties of kingship, and was always busily occupied at home or in his continental dominions. But Cheshire saw little or nothing of his son Richard, greatest of all Crusaders, for he spent the greater part of his reign seeking adventures abroad, and left his people to take care of themselves. ”

“ Their position was generally one of great strength, having been chosen in early times in order that men might be able to beat off the attacks of enemies. Chester was, as you have already seen, guarded on two sides by a bend of the river Dee, and was the meeting-place of Roman roads. Northwich on the Watling Street, Middlewich on Kind Street, and Stockport were all built at a point where two rivers meet. Runcorn, Lymm, and Altrincham are on sandstone heights protected on the north by the Mersey; Macclesfield is astride the main road in East Cheshire, and Nantwich on the highway into Wales. ”

“ Forty miles a day is not a high average for a good woodsman or canoe-man. As to following a trail in July, the very fact that the grass was so brittle, made it easy to follow recent tracks. Night camp fire and the general direction of the land would be guides enough for a good pathfinder, let alone the crumpled grasses left behind a horde of wandering Indians.
Kelsey’s Journal is to be found in the Parliamentary Report of 1749. At the time, it was handed over to Parliament, it was taken from Hudson’s Bay House, and is no longer in the records of the Company. ”

“ William captured the city and received the submission of Edric the Forester and other Saxon leaders. Chester was put in charge of a Flemish noble called Gherbod, who, however, in the following year returned to his native land. Then, leaving a trail of fire and sword through 59 mid-Cheshire, William marched southwards to Salisbury Plain, where he held a grand review of all his followers and distributed to them their rewards. You will not see him again in Cheshire. No part of the country ever needed a second visit from the 'Conqueror'. ”

“ We saw the lamp of Christianity burn brightly from Hildeburgh's Isle to Chadkirk, and some of the earliest Gospel teachers were sent by the very Welsh and Irish nations over which Cheshire was afterwards set as sentinel and watch-dog. Feebly the light sometimes glimmered in days of stress and storm, but it never went out; and after the Tudor monarch had shaken off the shackles of Rome, and the minds of men had been stirred by a great awakening, its early brightness was restored in a purified religion that gave freedom of conscience to all men. ”

“ Even to this day the tree is thought to possess the power of bringing good or evil. A superstitious Cheshire labourer will not, if he can help it, cut down an ash tree for fear it should bring him misfortune, and churn staves made of ash are used by farmers' wives to prevent the butter from being bewitched.
It is in fact from the Angles and Saxons that we have inherited the priceless possession of our English tongue. The oldest traces of our language in a written form in Cheshire may be seen in the Grosvenor Museum at Chester. ”

“ In the later years of Elizabeth's reign a constant stream of ill-clad and ill-paid soldiers marched through Cheshire on their way to the wars. The soldiers had to be supplied with food and quarters by the towns and villages through144 which they passed, and the cost of billeting the men in the houses on their arrival at Chester fell very hard on the city merchants, who were soon brought to great distress. The soldiers were generally put on board ship at Parkgate, for the channel of the Dee had become so choked up with sand that only the smallest vessels could reach Chester. ”

“ Some of these 'liberties' are set forth in the Charter which John the Scot gave to the people of Chester: 'Know that I have conceded and by this my present charter confirmed to all my citizens of Chester that no merchant should buy or sell any kind of merchandise which has come to the city of Chester by sea or by land, except these my citizens of Chester themselves and their heirs, or in accordance with their will, and except in the established fairs, that is on S. John the Baptist's day and at the feast of S. Michael. ”

“ For this reason Cheshire was called a County Palatine, that is, a county whose ruler exercises all the powers of an independent prince, save only that he owns allegiance to his overlord the king. And the sword, the 'sword of dignity', as it was called, was no light one. You may see it if ever you visit the British Museum, a mighty two-edged weapon four feet long, with its inscription in Latin engraved beneath the hilt, 'Hugo comes Cestriae,' Hugh Count of Chester. ”

“ The eighteenth-century vessels were the old 'wooden walls' of England, big sailing ships called 'three deckers', with three rows of guns pointing outwards from their sides. There is a model of one of them, the Royal George, over the inner door of Vernon Park Museum.
Robert Clive was the son of a Shropshire squire, and was educated at the little school in the Cheshire village of Allostock. Clive went to India and became a soldier. The English and French were fighting for the mastery of India, and it is to Clive's victories that we owe in a great measure our Indian Empire. ”