ng to
see"; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a pleasant, vague
picture of the town and all its surroundings. I might have dodged
happily enough all day about the main street and up to the castle and in
and out of byways, but the curious attraction that leads a person in a
strange place to follow, day after day, the same round, and to make set
habits for himself in a week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up
the same road that I had gone the evening before. When I came up to the
hat manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate. He
was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put to
await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he looked
something like the typical Jew old-clothesman. As I drew near, he came
sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so curious an expression
on his face that I instinctively prepared myself to apologise for some
unwitting trespass. His first question rather confirmed me in this
belief, for it was whether or not he had seen me going up this way last
night; and after having answered in the affirmative, I waited in some
alarm for the rest of my indictment. But the good man's heart was full
of peace; and he stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about
fishing, and walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright
shallow stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
how. As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats aside to
go along the water-side and show me where the large trout commonly lay,
underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much disappointed, for my
sake, that there were none visible just then. Then he wandered off on to
another tack, and stood a great while out in the middle of a meadow in
the hot sunshine, trying to make out that he had known me before, or, if
not me, some friend of mine--merely, I believe, out of a desire that we
should feel more friendly and at our ease with one another. At last he
made a little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very
words, for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the best
writing and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only the
sense, and that perhaps imperfectly. He began by saying that he had
little things in his past life that it gave him especial pleasure to
recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp impressions had now
died out in himself, but must at my age be still qui