'You seem to know every creature in Grasmere, down to the two-year-old babies,' said Hammond, Mary having just stopped to converse with an infantine group, straggling and struggling over the boulders. 'Pray, do you happen to know a man called Barlow, a very old man?'
'Old Sam Barlow,' exclaimed Mary; 'why, of course I know him.'
She said it as if he were a near relative, and the question palpably absurd.
'He is an old man, a hundred, at least, I should think,' said Hammond.
'Poor old Sam, not much on the wrong side of eighty. I go to see him every week, and take him his week's tobacco, poor old dear. It is his only comfort.'
'Is it?' asked Hammond. 'I should have doubted his having so humanising a taste as tobacco. He looks too evil a creature ever to have yielded to the softening influence of a pipe.'
'An evil creature! What, old Sam? Why he is the most genial old thing, and as cheery--loves to hear the newspaper read to him--the murders and railway accidents. He doesn't care for politics. Everybody likes old Sam Barlow.'
'I fancy the Grasmere idea of reverend and amiable age must be strictly local. I can only say that I never saw a more unholy countenance.'
'You must have been dreaming when you saw him,' said Mary. 'Where did you meet him?'
'On the Fell, about a quarter of a mile from the shrubbery gate.'
'_Did_ you? I shouldn't have thought he could have got so far. I've a good mind to take you to see him, this very afternoon, before we go home.'
'Do,' exclaimed Hammond, 'I should like it immensely. I thought him a hateful-looking old person; but there was something so thoroughly uncanny about him that he exercised an absolute fascination upon me: he magnetised me, I think, as the green-eyed cat magnetises the bird. I have been positively longing to see him again. He is a kind of human monster, and I hope some one will have a big bottle made ready for him and preserve him in spirits when he dies.'
'What a horrid idea! No, sir, dear old Barlow shall lie beside the Rotha, under the trees Wordsworth planted. He is such a man as Wordsworth would have loved.'
Mr. Hammond shrugged his shoulders, and said no more. Mary's little vehement ways, her enthusiasm, her love of that valley, which might be called her native place, albeit her eyes had opened upon heaven's light far away, her humility, were all very delightful in their way. She was not a perfect beauty, like Lesbia; but she was a fresh, pure-minded English girl, frank as the day, and if he had had a brother he would have recommended that brother to choose just such a girl for his wife.