This Is Not The
General Rule, However, And Accordingly The Waitress Was Shocked, As
One Might Be At A Heresy, To Hear The Route That I Had Sketched Out
For Myself.
Everybody who came to Cockermouth for pleasure, it
appeared, went on to Keswick.
It was in vain that I put up a
little plea for the liberty of the subject; it was in vain that I
said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. I was told that there
was 'nothing to see there' - that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood;
and at last, as the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I
gave way, as men always do in such circumstances, and agreed that I
was to leave for Keswick by a train in the early evening.
AN EVANGELIST
Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a Place with
'nothing to see'; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a
pleasant, vague picture of the town and all its surroundings. I
might have dodged happily enough all day about the main street and
up to the castle and in and out of byways, but the curious
attraction that leads a person in a strange place to follow, day
after day, the same round, and to make set habits for himself in a
week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up the same, road that
I had gone the evening before. When I came up to the hat
manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate. He
was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put
to await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he
looked something like the typical Jew old-clothes man. As I drew
near, he came sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so
curious an expression on his face that I instinctively prepared
myself to apologise for some unwitting trespass. His first
question rather confirmed me in this belief, for it was whether or
not he had seen me going up this way last night; and after having
answered in the affirmative, I waited in some alarm for the rest of
my indictment. But the good man's heart was full of peace; and he
stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about fishing, and
walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright shallow
stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
how. As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats
aside to go along the water-side and show me where the large trout
commonly lay, underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much
disappointed, for my sake, that there were none visible just then.
Then he wandered off on to another tack, and stood a great while
out in the middle of a meadow in the hot sunshine, trying to make
out that he had known me before, or, if not me, some friend of
mine, merely, I believe, out of a desire that we should feel more
friendly and at our ease with one another.
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