‘I daredn’t hurry,’ said Mr Colclough, setting us down at the station.  ‘I was afraid of a skid.’  He had not spoken during the transit.

‘Don’t put on side, Ol,’ said Mr Brindley.  ’What time did you get up this morning?’

‘Eight o’clock, lad.  I was at th’ works at nine.’

He flew off to escape my thanks, and Mr Brindley and I went into the station.  Owing to the celerity of the automobile we had half-an-hour to wait.  We spent it chiefly at the bookstall.  While we were there the extra-special edition of the Staffordshire Signal, affectionately termed ‘the local rag’ by its readers, arrived, and we watched a newsboy affix its poster to a board.  The poster ran thus—­

HANBRIDGE RATES LIVELY MEETING

—­

KNYPE F.C.  NEW CENTRE—­FORWARD

—­

All—­Winners and S.P.

Now, close by this poster was the poster of the daily Telegraph, and among the items offered by the daily Telegraph was:  ’Death of Simon Fuge’.  I could not forbear pointing out to Mr Brindley the difference between the two posters.  A conversation ensued; and amid the rumbling of trains and the rough stir of the platform we got back again to Simon Fuge, and Mr Brindley’s tone gradually grew, if not acrid, a little impatient.

‘After all,’ he said, ’rates are rates, especially in Hanbridge.  And let me tell you that last season Knype Football Club jolly nearly got thrown out of the First League.  The constitution of the team for this next season—­why, damn it, it’s a question of national importance!  You don’t understand these things.  If Knype Football Club was put into the League Second Division, ten thousand homes would go into mourning.  Who the devil was Simon Fuge?’

They joke with such extraordinary seriousness in the Five Towns that one is somehow bound to pretend that they are not joking.  So I replied—­

’He was a great artist.  And this is his native district.  Surely you ought to be proud of him!’

‘He may have been a great artist,’ said Mr Brindley, ’or he may not.  But for us he was simply a man who came of a family that had a bad reputation for talking too much and acting the goat!’

‘Well,’ I said, We shall see—­in fifty years.’

‘That’s just what we shan’t,’ said he.  ’We shall be where Simon Fuge is—­dead!  However, perhaps we are proud of him.  But you don’t expect us to show it, do you?  That’s not our style.’

He performed the quasi-winking phenomenon with his eyes.  It was his final exhibition of it to me.

‘A strange place!’ I reflected, as I ate my dinner in the dining-car, with the pressure of Mr Brindley’s steely clasp still affecting my right hand, and the rich, honest cordiality of his au revoir in my heart.  ‘A place that is passing strange!’