“Padiham, in a secluded part of London, keeps a hospital for the poor and the sick.
“There are bright roses in the upper windows. No masculine fingers know how to lure blossoms into being so tenderly.
“Bright roses in the rooms above; able drawings giving refinement to the rusty shop below.
“Can it be that they are there, under the very roof of that grim good Samaritan?
“In the three millions have I come upon my two units?
“Going straight forward and minding my own business, have I effected in one day what Brent has failed in utterly after a search of months?
“But let me not neglect the counter facts?
“I did not recognize these pictures when I saw them. Perhaps what I find in them now is fancy. My own vivid remembrance of the scene at Luggernel may be doing artist-work, and dignifying some commonplace illustration of an old ballad. Ours was not the first such group since men were made and horses made for them. Fulano has had no lack of forefathers in heroism.
“And the manor-house? There are, perhaps, in Padiham’s own county, a hundred such ancient many-gabled brick halls, a hundred lawns fair as the one that falls away gently from Mr. Clitheroe’s ancestral mansion, scores of oaks as stately as the one that was lucky enough to shadow Wordsworth, and so cool his head for a sonnet in grateful recompense.
“Padiham may have a daughter who draws horses and houses to delude me,—imaginative fellow that I am becoming!