But while the place itself would easily have been passed over, not so the figure at the door; for there, most days of the week and most hours of the day, stood the portly form of Edward John Charles himself.
It was as though the legend overhead referred to the man beneath, and the smile usually on his face spoke of contentment with himself and the world at large. His face was ruddy and clean-shaven, as he chose to coax his whisker underneath his chin, where it sprouted so amply that the need to wear a collar or a tie did not exist; certainly, was not recognised.
Somewhat under medium height, and of more than medium girth, Edward John Charles was by no means an unpleasant figure to the eye, and if the commonplace caste of face and prominent ears did not suggest any marked intellectual gifts, the net result of a casual survey was "a good-natured sort." He had a habit of concealing his hands mysteriously underneath his coat-tails as he stood at the door beneath the staring sign, and his coat had absorbed something of its owner's nature, for by the perch of the tails one could guess his mood. They were flapped nervously when the wearer was displeased; they opened into a wide and settled V inverted when he was in the full flavour of his satisfaction; and happily that was their most common condition. Indeed, the coat-tails of Edward John Charles were as eloquent as the stumpy appendage of the Irish terrier usually to be seen at the door with him.
Edward John stood in his familiar place this morning, and surveyed placidly the one and only street of Hampton Bagot.
The street does not belong to Hampton at all, but is only so many yards of a great highway to London. If you asked a Hampton man where it led to, he would say to Stratford, as that is the end of his world. That he is spending his life on a main-travelled road that goes on and on until it is lost in the multitudinous streets of modern Babylon has never occurred to him. Stratford is his ultima thule, the objective of his longest travels.
But Edward John was no ordinary man, despite his common exterior, and it was in the list of his distinctions that he had in his early manhood spent two days in London. To him, the road on which he looked out for so many hours each day was one of the tentacles thrown out by the mighty City to drag the sons of Nature into its gluttonous maw.
"It ain't got me, 'owever," he reflected, as he contentedly wagged his tails; "but as for 'Enry, why, 'oo knows?"
And really, what London would have done with Edward John we cannot guess, nor have we at present any idea of what it will do with 'Enry.
At this particular moment you would scarcely have credited the postmaster-bookseller-tobacconist with such philosophic reflections; for he seemed to be chiefly interested in watching with a critical eye a dawdling creature by the name of Miffin, the inefficient tailor across the way.
Edward John pursed his lips and flapped his coat-tails in stern disapproval of that sluggard's method of removing the single shutter which covered his window as a protection from the sun's rays, rather than a barrier to thieves, the latter being unknown in Hampton. Miffin made the mere act of withdrawing a bolt a function of five or ten minutes' duration, exchanging courtesies with every possible creature in the neighbourhood, from schoolboys to cats, while engaged in the operation. He would even call across to Edward John on the state of the day, and secretly wonder when the postmaster ever did a stroke of work, while in the mind of the latter certain wise maxims about ants and sluggards from the Book of Proverbs were suggesting themselves as peculiarly applicable to Mr. Miffin.