only surviving son
lived until his death a few years ago. The park contains some fine trees,
and the house is a good specimen of the domestic architecture of the time of
Elizabeth.

[ASTON HALL: ill15.jpg]

It was sold for a trifling sum, with an imperfect title, which time has
cured, to a speculating banker; and, after having been let to the late James
Watt on a long lease, is now likely to exchange mansion and park for a
congeries of cottages in rows, forming forty-shilling freeholders.

The passion which the mechanics of Birmingham have for investing in land has
rendered land near that town dearer than in parallel situations near London.

THE BLACK COUNTRY.
WALSALL, DUDLEY, WEDNESBURY, DARLASTON.

The first diverging railway after leaving Handsworth, on the road to the
north, is what, for want of a better name, is called the South Staffordshire,
which connects Birmingham with Dudley, Walsall, Lichfield, and Tamworth, thus
uniting the most purely agricultural with the most thoroughly manufacturing
districts, and especially with that part of the great coal-field which is
locally known as the "Black Country." In this Black Country, including West
Bromwich, Wednesbury, Dudley, and Darlaston, Bilston, Wolverhampton, and
several minor villages, a perpetual twilight reigns during the day, and
during the night fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a fiery
glow. The pleasant green of pastures is almost unknown, the streams, in
which no fishes swim, are black and unwholesome; the natural dead flat is
often broken by huge hills of cinders and spoil from the mines; the few trees
are stunted and blasted; no birds are to be seen, except a few smoky
sparrows; and for miles on miles a black waste spreads around, where furnaces
continually smoke, steam-engines thud and hiss, and long chains clank, while
blind gin-horses walk their doleful round. From time to time you pass a
cluster of deserted roofless cottages of dingiest brick, half-swallowed up in
sinking pits or inclining to every point of the compass, while the timbers
point up like the ribs of a half-decayed corpse. The majority of the natives
of this Tartarian region are in full keeping with the scenery--savages,
without the grace of savages, coarsely clad in filthy garments, with no
change on week-days and Sundays, they converse in a language belarded with
fearful and disgusting oaths, which can scarcely be recognized as the same as
that of civi