joking. So I replied--

'He was a great artist. And this is his native district. Surely you
ought to be proud of him!'

'He may have been a great artist,' said Mr Brindley, 'or he may not.
But for us he was simply a man who came of a family that had a bad
reputation for talking too much and acting the goat!'

'Well,' I said, We shall see--in fifty years.'

'That's just what we shan't,' said he. 'We shall be where Simon Fuge
is--dead! However, perhaps we are proud of him. But you don't expect us
to show it, do you? That's not our style.'

He performed the quasi-winking phenomenon with his eyes. It was his
final exhibition of it to me.

'A strange place!' I reflected, as I ate my dinner in the dining-car,
with the pressure of Mr Brindley's steely clasp still affecting my
right hand, and the rich, honest cordiality of his au revoir in my
heart. 'A place that is passing strange!'

And I thought further: He may have been a boaster, and a chatterer, and
a man who suffered from cold feet at the wrong moments! And the Five
Towns may have got the better of him, now. But that portrait of the
little girl in the Wedgwood Institution is waiting there, right in the
middle of the Five Towns. And one day the Five Towns will have to 'give
it best'. They can say what they like! ... What eyes the fellow had,
when he was in the right company!

IN A NEW BOTTLE

Commercial travellers are rather like bees; they take the seed of a
good story from one district and deposit it in another.

Thus several localities, imperfectly righteous, have within recent
years appropriated this story to their own annals. I once met an old
herbalist from Wigan-Wigan of all places in beautiful England!--who
positively asserted that the episode occurred just outside the London
and North-Western main line station at Wigan. This old herbalist was no
judge of the value of evidence. An undertaker from Hull told me flatly,
little knowing who I was and where I came from, that he was the
undertaker concerned in the episode. This undertaker was a liar. I use
this term because there is no other word in the language which
accurately expresses my meaning. Of persons who have taken the trouble
to come over from the United States in order to inform me that the
affair happened at Harper's Ferry, Poughkeepsie, Syracuse, Allegheny,
Indianapolis, Columbus, Charlotte, Tabernacle, Alliance, Wheeling,
Lynchburg, and Chicago it would be unbecoming to speak--they ar