I would have found every mile-stone leading
to dear old Winborongh just as I had left it.
Cyril, who had seen the place more recently,
was prepared for changes, but they pained
me extremely.

At the end of our journey—it was then
night—I could scarcely set foot in the Naseby
Arms omnibus, from a sense that it had
injuriously displaced the defunct Monarch
coach. I was positively wroth to see the
quaint, red-bricked Naseby Arms of yore
now fronted with stucco and transformed
into an hotel. The chamber-maids of past
days had been lively and smiling; the new
ladies of the bed-chamber were reserved and
mincing. The waiters of old ran about in
jackets, and cried "coming!" Their
successors, grave in tailed coats and starch,
glided before you like ghosts, and, like them,
waited until you broke the spell of silence by
speaking first. It was not until Cyril and I
were seated in a snug room at our little tea-
table that my spirits revived. The first
thing that did me good was the sight of a
venerable urn of obsolete shape and battered
sides. Shortly after, the waiter brought us
tea-cakes of a kind peculiar to the district,
and emitting a scorched, oveny sort of
perfume. Had the scent been that of heliotrope,
violet, or verbena, it could not so have
touched me. That long-lost odour sent me
back to the bright wide-ranged grate of the
kitchen in Pollux Lane. I am not ashamed
to say that I wept, and felt that I was once
more at Winborough.

Cyril now told me that while entering the
inn he had been recognised by Roxby the
artist. I was glad to hear that my brother
had asked this old friend to join us. He had
gone home as I surmised, for purposes of
the toilet; but they must have been
accomplished rapidly, as he presented himself in a
few minutes. The dear old man was much
altered. His hair was grey, his face ploughed
up in anxious lines, and he had contracted a
stoop. But for the quick vivacious eye, I
might not have known him. Without at first
noticing me, he seized Cyril's hands, worked
them as if they had been handles of a pump,
and laughed till he cried while speaking of
his former pupil's success. "I knew he had
it in him!" he shouted exultingly.

Touching on his own prospects the good
man was somewhat subdued. His nature was
too buoyant to despond easily; but he hinted
that the patron who was, some day, to
discover his genius, was rather late in making
his appearance. It was not envy, but a
dawning knowledge of life as he neared
its close, that made him observe to me,—
"Perhaps the nobleman who is to find me
out might have done so before this; if, like
your brother, I had painted modern people
instead of Homer's gods." Of course, we
did our best to cheer our old friend, one of
whose pictures Cyril predicted, would soon
be exhibited. I thought my brother too
sanguine, but the picture—a far more finished
one than I could have expected—was, in due
time, seen on the walls of the academy, and
found a liberal purchaser.

Our first pilgrimage, next day, was to the
resting-place of our beloved mother. We
then re-entered the town, delaying by a sort
of tacit understanding our visit to the old
house.

Jubb's old shop, in the market-place, was
now kept by another proprietor. It gloried
in plate-glass windows, and styled itself
"Metropolitan Emporium." Perkins, the
patrician hair-dresser, had vanished, and
slept, perchance, among unnoted townsfolk
who had never been summoned to the Hall.
His son, a young gentleman, whose
revolutionary ideas might have hastened the old
man's decline, had joined the business of toy-
seller to that of hair-dresser, and dispensed
toys and marbles to noisy urchins in those
erst silent precincts, where his awful father
had once shred their locks. Sparkes, the book-
seller, had retired, and his window, under the
sway of his successor, was distinguished by
numerous denunciatiug pamphlets from the
pen of the new vicar,—The way to the Pit—
levelled at poor De l'Orme and his Comedians,
and A Snare for the Young, directed against
the race-ball, may instance the commodities
that were to be had within. As we approached
the shop a carriage drove up, and we saw
protrude a gouty-looking foot, swathed,
rather than clad, in a very ample velvet
slipper. The tenant of the carriage got out
with difficulty, though aided by her servant,
She dropped a gold-headed stick on which she
leaned. Cyril stooped and gave it to her.
The lady steadied herself, and a gleam of
gracious feeling softened her sharp, sad face.
By that sign only could we have
recognised the once brilliant Countess of
Naseby.

We passed into the High Street, and were
nearing Pollux Lane. I felt the arm on
which I leaned tighten, nor was I surprised
when Cyril said that he had letters to post,
and begged me to precede him, by a few
minutes, to the old house. I knew that the
subdued emotions of life were surging on his
firmness, and that he waited for the tide to
ebb.

We took different ways. In a minute or
two I reached the lane. The corner shop,
still a grocer's, was new, so dazzling that the
reticent Nettleship would have scorned to
own it. Glass jars with crystallised candies
refracted the sunlight. Confections of fruit
lay temptingly in half-opened boxes, on the
lids of which the peasants of all Europe,
stimulated, no doubt, by their propinquity
to such dainties, were performing their
national dances. I might not have known
where I was, but for the measured thump
of the steam-engine, which worked a mill
on the opposite bank of the river. The
sound, so familiar to my childhood, startled