We foresee domestic trouble when the Flat system reaches India.
AN ECCENTRIC.
Having alighted on strange ground at Chiswick Park Station, I was lost. My destination was Hogarth's House—one of the few homes of the illustrious which are preserved for pious pilgrims, but whether to go this way or that I had no notion, nor was there anyone to ask. I therefore turned to the left and, just after being half-blinded by a dusty whirlwind, stopped an errand-boy and was told by him I had done right, and had but to keep on.
I therefore continued, but with so little confidence that a hundred yards further on I stopped another wayfarer, who, however, had no knowledge of any Hogarth but a local laundry of that name, and could not say where it was.
It was then that I fell into the arms of as admirable although peculiar a man as I ever hope to meet, and communicative too. He was one of those elderly men who keep their youth, largely by virtue of cheerful spirits. He was short and active and he wore a cap. He had sandy-grey hair and a touch of sandy-grey whisker; his eye was bright and his cheeks were ruddy. He beamed with contentment. He may not have been, as the diverting Mr. Berry says in Tina, "fearfully crisp," but he was crisp enough.
Did he know Chiswick? Why, he had known it for nearly sixty years. Then he knew Hogarth's House? No, he couldn't say he did, but, anyhow, it must be in the other direction, because this, strictly speaking, was Acton Green and not Chiswick at all. To get to Chiswick I ought to have gone the other way. "But a depraved errand-boy——" I began to say, and then realising that the recapitulation of other people's errors is perhaps the idlest form of speech, where nearly all lack necessity, I said instead that the natives did not seem to specialise much in knowledge of their locality; to which he replied that they ought to, for there was no more beautiful place in the world.
"I'm going in the direction you want, myself," he added. "The fact is we're moving, and I've got to get some new blinds, and the shop's on your way."
So we fell into step, I with great difficulty keeping up with his happy buoyancy.
Yes, he admitted, moving was a trial, but his new house was far more comfortable than the old one, and, after all, what's a little trouble?