DUDLEY. 127

and about the same time Prior Moore, of Worcester Monastery, bought three pairs of blankets " at Wyche faire." The present Mayor of Droitwich is John Blick, Esq., who has several times served the office.

1 Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown."

Dudley.

WHAT is to become of the great town of Dudley and the district of South Staffordshire in another century? That is really one of the great questions of the day. Professor Jevons - like another Jonah, sitting under his gourd in the sight of Nineveh - would make us believe that in the year 1967 Dudley will be a deserted village, its streets grass-grown, and the last inhabitant sitting on the ruins of the old castle, and shivering for the want of a coal fire, after casting his sad eyes around the baleful district lateleeming with enormous industries, but then converted into a' howling waste, will straightway immolate himself down some exhausted pit. Well, I don't believe a word of this prediction, but I am sanguine enough to think that the Parliamentary Coal Commission, at the termination of their labours, will be enabled to assure the country that Mr. Jevons is a mere alarmist. Indeed that gentleman's fallacies have already been exposed; and although the reduction of the national debt may be a good thing per se, such a basis for it as that of the speedy exhaustion of our coal fields would probably be a fallacious one. Not to reckon on the discoveries of new resources - such as that now confidently talked of in Shropshire—the driving of foreign countries, like Spain, to their own abundant beds, mstead of permitting them to import coal from England —the enormous and almost untapped coal fields of America