This mill is now destroyed. The present cottage was, at
the time of which I write, occupied by the teachers' rooms, the dinner-
room and kitchens, and some smaller bedrooms. On going into this
building, I found one part, that nearest to the high road, converted into
a poor kind of public-house, then to let, and having all the squalid
appearance of a deserted place, which rendered it difficult to judge what
it would look like when neatly kept up, the broken panes replaced in the
windows, and the rough-cast (now cracked and discoloured) made white and
whole. The other end forms a cottage, with the low ceilings and stone
floors of a hundred years ago; the windows do not open freely and widely;
and the passage upstairs, leading to the bedrooms, is narrow and
tortuous: altogether, smells would linger about the house, and damp cling
to it. But sanitary matters were little understood thirty years ago; and
it was a great thing to get a roomy building close to the high road, and
not too far from the habitation of Mr. Wilson, the originator of the
educational scheme. There was much need of such an institution; numbers
of ill-paid clergymen hailed the prospect with joy, and eagerly put down
the names of their children as pupils when the establishment should be
ready to receive them. Mr. Wilson was, no doubt, pleased by the
impatience with which the realisation of his idea was anticipated, and
opened the school with less than a hundred pounds in hand, and with
pupils, the number of whom varies according to different accounts; Mr.
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