I wondered where Ham Lake was.  I knew merely that it lay somewhere in the environs of the Five Towns.  What put fuel on the fire of my interest in the private affairs of the dead painter was the slightly curious coincidence that on the evening of the news of his death I should be travelling to the Five Towns—­and for the first time in my life.  Here I was at Knype, which, as I had gathered from Bradshaw, and from my acquaintance Brindley, was the traffic centre of the Five Towns.

II

My knowledge of industrial districts amounted to nothing.  Born in Devonshire, educated at Cambridge, and fulfilling my destiny as curator of a certain department of antiquities at the British Museum, I had never been brought into contact with the vast constructive material activities of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Staffordshire.  I had but passed through them occasionally on my way to Scotland, scorning their necessary grime with the perhaps too facile disdain of the clean-faced southerner, who is apt to forget that coal cannot walk up unaided out of the mine, and that the basin in which he washes his beautiful purity can only be manufactured amid conditions highly repellent.  Well, my impressions of the platform of Knype station were unfavourable.  There was dirt in the air; I could feel it at once on my skin.  And the scene was shabby, undignified, and rude.  I use the word ‘rude’ in all its senses.  What I saw was a pushing, exclamatory, ill-dressed, determined crowd, each member of which was bent on the realization of his own desires by the least ceremonious means.  If an item of this throng wished to get past me, he made me instantly aware of his wish by abruptly changing my position in infinite space; it was not possible to misconstrue his meaning.  So much crude force and naked will-to-live I had not before set eyes on.  In truth, I felt myself to be a very brittle, delicate bit of intellectual machinery in the midst of all these physical manifestations.  Yet I am a tallish man, and these potters appeared to me to be undersized, and somewhat thin too!  But what elbows!  What glaring egoistic eyes!  What terrible decisiveness in action!

‘Now then, get in if ye’re going!’ said a red-haired porter to me curtly.

‘I’m not going.  I’ve just got out,’ I replied.

‘Well, then, why dunna’ ye stand out o’ th’ wee and let them get in as wants to?’

Unable to offer a coherent answer to this crushing demand, I stood out of the way.  In the light of further knowledge I now surmise that that porter was a very friendly and sociable porter.  But at the moment I really believed that, taking me for the least admirable and necessary of God’s creatures, he meant to convey his opinion to me for my own good.  I glanced up at the lighted windows of the train, and saw the composed, careless faces of haughty persons who were going direct from London to Manchester, and