And I thought further:  He may have been a boaster, and a chatterer, and a man who suffered from cold feet at the wrong moments!  And the Five Towns may have got the better of him, now.  But that portrait of the little girl in the Wedgwood Institution is waiting there, right in the middle of the Five Towns.  And one day the Five Towns will have to ‘give it best’.  They can say what they like! ...  What eyes the fellow had, when he was in the right company!

IN A NEW BOTTLE

Commercial travellers are rather like bees; they take the seed of a good story from one district and deposit it in another.

Thus several localities, imperfectly righteous, have within recent years appropriated this story to their own annals.  I once met an old herbalist from Wigan-Wigan of all places in beautiful England!—­who positively asserted that the episode occurred just outside the London and North-Western main line station at Wigan.  This old herbalist was no judge of the value of evidence.  An undertaker from Hull told me flatly, little knowing who I was and where I came from, that he was the undertaker concerned in the episode.  This undertaker was a liar.  I use this term because there is no other word in the language which accurately expresses my meaning.  Of persons who have taken the trouble to come over from the United States in order to inform me that the affair happened at Harper’s Ferry, Poughkeepsie, Syracuse, Allegheny, Indianapolis, Columbus, Charlotte, Tabernacle, Alliance, Wheeling, Lynchburg, and Chicago it would be unbecoming to speak—­they are best left to silence themselves by mutual recrimination.  The fact is that the authentic scene of the affair was a third-class railway carriage belonging to the North Staffordshire Railway Company, and rolling on that company’s loop-line between Longshaw and Hanbridge.  The undertaker is now dead—­it is a disturbing truth that even undertakers die sometimes—­and since his widow has given me permission to mention his name, I shall mention his name.  It was Edward Till.  Of course everybody in the Five Towns knows who the undertaker was, and if anybody in the Five Towns should ever chance to come across this book, I offer him my excuses for having brought coals to Newcastle.

Mr Till used to be a fairly well-known figure in Hanbridge, which is the centre of undertaking, as it is of everything else, in the Five Towns.  He was in a small but a successful way of business, had one leg a trifle shorter than the other (which slightly deteriorated the majesty of his demeanour on solemn occasions), played the fiddle, kept rabbits, and was of a forgetful disposition.  It was possibly this forgetful disposition which had prevented him from rising into a large way of business.  All admired his personal character and tempered geniality; but there are some things that will not bear forgetting.  However, the story touches but lightly that side of his individuality.