’Come in, wut,’[1] cried Meshach impatiently from the hob, ’come in and let’s be pecking a bit,’ and as Arthur and Hannah entered the parlour, he added:  ’She’s gotten sausages for you.  She would get ’em, though I told her you’d take us as you found us.  I told her that.  But women—­well, you know what they are!’

  [1] Wut = wilt.

‘Eh, Meshach, Meshach!’ the old damsel protested sadly, and escaped into the kitchen.

And when Meshach insisted that the guest should serve out the sausages, and Hannah, passing his tea, said it was a shame to trouble him, Twemlow slipped suddenly back into the old life and ways and ideas.  This existence, which he thought he had utterly forgotten, returned again and triumphed for a time over all the experiences of his manhood; it alone seemed real, honest, defensible.  Sensations of his long and restless career in New York flashed through his mind as he impaled Hannah’s sausages in the curious parlour—­the hysteric industry of his girl-typist, the continuous hot-water service in the bedroom of his glittering apartment at the Concord House, youthful nights at Coster and Bial’s music-hall, an insanely extravagant dinner at Sherry’s on his thirtieth birthday, a difficulty once with an emissary of Pinkerton, the incredible plague of flies in summer.  And during all those racing years of clangour and success in New York, the life of Bursley, self-sufficient and self-contained, had preserved its monotonous and slow stolidity.  Bursley had become a museum to him; he entered it as he might have entered the Middle Ages, and was astonished to find that beautiful which once he had deemed sordid and commonplace.  Some of the streets seemed like a monument of the past, a picturesque survival; the crate-floats, drawn by swift shaggy ponies and driven by men who balanced themselves erect on two thin boards while flying round corners, struck him as the quaintest thing in the world.

‘And what’s going on nowadays in old Bosley, Miss Myatt?’ he asked expansively, trying to drop his American accent and use the dialect.

‘Eh, bless us!’ exclaimed Hannah, startled.  ’Nothing ever happens here, Mr. Arthur.’

He felt that nothing did happen there.

‘Same here as elsewhere,’ said Meshach.  ’People living, and getting childer to worry ’em, and dying.  Nothing’ll cure ’em of it seemingly.  Is there anything different to that in New York?  Or can they do without cemeteries?’

Twemlow laughed, and again he had the illusion of having come back to reality after a long, hurried dream.  ’Nothing seems to have changed here,’ he remarked idly.

‘Nothing changed!’ said Meshach.  ’Nay, nay!  We’re up in the world.  We’ve got the steam-car.  And we’ve got public baths.  We wash oursen nowadays.  And there’s talk of a park, and a pond with a duck on it.  We’re moving with the times, my lad, and so’s the rates.’

It gave him pleasure to be called ‘my lad’ by old Meshach.  It was piquant to him that the first earthenware factor in New York, the Jupiter of a Fourteenth Street office, should be addressed as a stripling.  ‘And where is the park to be?’ he suavely inquired.