himself confessed ridiculous, lest the sentimental character of his errand should be known.
He wandered out a little disconsolately into the lane. It was high noon, but there was an autumn mist abroad, and autumn gossamer, clogged thick with congested frost drops, showed everywhere in the hedges. The lane was carpeted thick with fallen leaves, and an earthy odour rose from them, remindful of a hundred memories, all more or less of a mildly sentimental kind. Except when the poetical watchspring set his internal works agoing, and the poetic musical-box sounded its pretty little inward tunes, Brown-Smith was, in the main, a mildly cheerful person. But to-day, what with the train in which his thoughts had started in the morning, and his propinquity to his old sweetheart, and the signs of lovely decay everywhere about, he grew to feel actually downcast and dejected. All the mistakes of his life rose up before him, all its failures and follies. He felt forlorn and old, and life in general seemed to be a very bitter business.
In this melancholy mood he wandered on, until it occurred to him that he had made half a dozen aimless turnings, and had no idea of his present whereabouts. He got lost in his favourite London once a week, but there he had always the ubiquitous cabman to appeal to. Here there was nobody. The lane in which he found himself was just wide enough for the passage of an ordinary vehicle, and was so walled in by thick-leaved hedges, and so arched over by embracing boughs, that the foggy gloom of the day was doubled, and only a damp and mournful twilight illuminated his surroundings. The silence and the solitude suited the mood into which he had allowed himself to fall, and, since he had made it a lifelong practice to surrender himself to his own fancies, he found it easy to give way to this. He arranged his long paletot so that he might take no damage from the moist grass, and, sitting down upon a bank by the roadside, took the russet beard in both hands, and sat staring at the bank opposite like a model for a statue of a poet in reverie. Somebody might come by to guide him in a while; if not, no matter.
"Brokers"
Just as he had arrived comfortably at the conclusion that there was nothing in the world in which it was worth while to be for a moment interested, he was recalled to his honest, natural self by the merest trifle of an incident, in the progress of which he immediately became absorbed.
"This way, gentlemen, if you please," said a voice at once suave and businesslike.
The poet turned, and looked across his shoulder in the direction of the voice. Just where he sat there was a slight gap in the hedge—a mere eyelet hole, large enough to afford him an unrestricted view, but so small that the hedge effectually concealed his presence. He saw before him a pretty little garden, a smooth-shaven lawn, and a small and unpretentious residence of the cottage-villa order. From its door emerged a bustling gentleman in a white hat, carrying a notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. He was followed by some half-dozen men in various stages of dirty flashness, who had each and all beady eyes, and red lips, and thick hooked noses, and who each carried in one hand a pamphlet and in the other a pencil. The bard immediately recognised these gentlemen as brokers, and he knew, without need of explanation, that a sale of household effects
