occurred Blair explained at breakfast without a notion that there was any reason for apology or regret.
“I sat up till about half-past twelve, and went up to bed and said, ‘Where’s Vixen?’”—the beloved dogs always slept with him. “There was no Vixen. I went downstairs and looked everywhere, and then heard poor Vixen whining outside the front door. I tried to undo the chains and things, but couldn’t manage it, and couldn’t find a soul about, and there was the poor dog whining outside. Luckily”—what an adverb to choose—“luckily I found a broom lying about, so I just swept the row of bells in the passage backwards and forwards until quite a lot of people came, and we let the poor dog in.”
The late Bishop of St. Asaph, who had come for the rest cure, left the next morning, but Mrs. Davis only laughed. If Blair was in an hotel it mattered not who came or went.
Blair was full of hygienic fads, and one of them was a very huge sponge, which was placed on the window-sill of his second floor bedroom, and much admired by passers-by in the street. Blair would discourse at length on the properties of the sponge, and how it soaked in ozone all day and gave it forth in the morning tub. One afternoon we were standing at our sitting-room window, which was directly beneath his bedroom, and Blair called our attention to two little dogs having a tug-of-war in the street with what looked like a long rope. Blair cheered
on the smaller dog, leaning out of the window and shouting, “Go it, little ’un! Two to one on the black one. Stick to it! Stick at it! Hurrah! No! What! Good heavens! It’s my sponge.” The next we saw was Blair with an umbrella separating the combatants and swearing vigorously. The hygienic properties of the rescued morsels were never afterwards referred to.
I learned in that visit the wonderful qualities of Welsh air. I came down scarcely able to walk from the hotel to the station; I finished up in a fortnight with more than a twenty-mile tramp. Blair was a great hill walker, and knew Wales and the Lake District in and out. The younger generation of Manchester will find as they grow old that they have lost many of the pleasures of memory which might have been theirs, because they have spent their holiday hours on crowded tees and in arid bunkers when they might have been learning something of what Coleridge meant when he wrote of
“The power, the beauty and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest, by slow stream or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths.”