‘Do,’ exclaimed Hammond, ’I should like it immensely.  I thought him a hateful-looking old person; but there was something so thoroughly uncanny about him that he exercised an absolute fascination upon me:  he magnetised me, I think, as the green-eyed cat magnetises the bird.  I have been positively longing to see him again.  He is a kind of human monster, and I hope some one will have a big bottle made ready for him and preserve him in spirits when he dies.’

’What a horrid idea!  No, sir, dear old Barlow shall lie beside the Rotha, under the trees Wordsworth planted.  He is such a man as Wordsworth would have loved.’

Mr. Hammond shrugged his shoulders, and said no more.  Mary’s little vehement ways, her enthusiasm, her love of that valley, which might be called her native place, albeit her eyes had opened upon heaven’s light far away, her humility, were all very delightful in their way.  She was not a perfect beauty, like Lesbia; but she was a fresh, pure-minded English girl, frank as the day, and if he had had a brother he would have recommended that brother to choose just such a girl for his wife.

Mr. Samuel Barlow occupied a little old cottage, which seemed to consist chiefly of a gable end and a chimney stack, in that cluster of dwellings behind St. Oswald’s church, which was once known as the Kirk Town.  Visitors went downstairs to get to Mr. Barlow’s ground-floor, for the influence of time and advancing civilisation had raised the pathway in front of Mr. Barlow’s cottage until his parlour had become of a cellar-like aspect.  Yet it was a very nice little parlour when one got down to it, and it enjoyed winter and summer a perpetual twilight, since the light that crept through the leaded casement was tempered by a screen of flowerpots, which were old Barlow’s particular care.  There were no finer geraniums in all Grasmere than Barlow’s, no bigger carnations or picotees, asters or arums.

It was about five o’clock in the March afternoon, when Mary ushered John Hammond into Mr. Barlow’s dwelling, and, in the dim glow of a cheery little fire and the faint light that filtered through the screen of geranium leaves, the visitor looked for a moment or so doubtfully at the owner of the cottage.  But only for a moment.  Those bright blue eyes and apple cheeks, that benevolent expression, bore no likeness to the strange old man he had seen on the Fell.  Mr. Barlow was toothless and nut-cracker like of outline; he was thin and shrunken, and bent with the burden of long years, but his healthy visage had none of those deep lines, those cross markings and hollows which made the pallid countenance of that other old man as ghastly as would be the abstract idea of life’s last stage embodied by the bitter pencil of a Hogarth.

‘I have brought a gentleman from London to see you, Sam,’ said Mary.  ’He fancied he met you on the Fell the other morning.’

Barlow rose and quavered a cheery welcome, but protested against the idea of his having got so far as the Fell.