“And there is the Ribble, too. A lovely river, coming from the hills;—such a stream as I have not seen on this continent. I do not wish to make harsh comparisons, but your Mississippi and Missouri are more like ditches than rivers, and as to the Platte, why, sir, it seems to me no better than a chain of mud-pools. But the Ribble is quite another thing. I suppose I love it more because I have dabbled in it a boy, and bathed in it a man, and have seen it flow on always a friend, whether I was rich or poor. Nature, sir, does not look coldly on a poor man, as humanity does. The river Ribble and Pendle Hill have been faithful to me,—they and my dear Ellen, always.
“Perhaps I tire you with this chat,” he said.
“O no!” replied I. “I should be a poor American if I did not love to hear of Mother England everywhere and always.”
“I almost fear to talk about home—our old home, I mean—to my dear child. She might grow a little homesick, you know. And how could she understand, so young and a woman too, that duty makes exile needful? Of course I do not mean to suggest that we deem our new home in the Promised Land an exile.”
And here he again gave the same anxious look I had before observed; as if he dreaded that I had the power to dissolve an unsubstantial illusion.
“I wish I had thought,” he continued, “to show you, when you were at tea, a picture of Clitheroe Hall I have. It is my daughter Ellen’s work. She has a genius for art, really a genius. We have been living in a cottage near there, where she could see the Hall from her window,—dear old place!—and she has made a capital drawing of it.”
“You had left it?” I asked. He had paused, commanded by his melancholy recollections.
“O yes! Did I not tell you about my losses? I was a rich man and prosperous once. I kept open house, sir, in my wife’s lifetime. She was a great beauty. My dear Ellen is like her, but she has no beauty,—a good girl and daughter, though, like all young people, she has a juvenile wish to govern,—but no beauty. Perhaps she will grow handsome when we grow rich again.”
“Few women are so attractive as Miss Clitheroe,” I said, baldly enough.
“I have tried to be a good father to her, sir. She should have had diamonds and pearls, and everything that young ladies want, if I had succeeded. But you ought to have seen Clitheroe Hall, sir, in its best days. Such oaks as I had in my park! One of those oaks is noticed in Evelyn’s Silva. One day, a great many years ago, I found a young man sitting under that oak writing verses. I was hospitable to him, and gave him luncheon, which he ate with very good appetite, if he was a poet. I did not ask his name; but not three months after I received a volume of poems, with a sonnet among them, really very well done, very well done indeed, inscribed to the Clitheroe Oak. The volume, sir, was by Mr. Wordsworth, quite one of our best poets, in his way, the founder of a new school.”