The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to
the smart waitress my intention of continuing down
the coast and through Whitehaven to Furness, and,
as I might have expected, I was instantly confronted
by that last and most worrying form of interference,
that chooses to introduce tradition and authority
into the choice of a man’s own pleasures.
I can excuse a person combating my religious or philosophical
heresies, because them I have deliberately accepted,
and am ready to justify by present argument.
But I do not seek to justify my pleasures. If
I prefer tame scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine
over lowland parks and woodlands to the war of the
elements round the summit of Mont Blanc; or if I prefer
a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of one or
two chosen companions, to a ball where I feel myself
very hot, awkward, and weary, I merely state these
preferences as facts, and do not seek to establish
them as principles. 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;
