The silence was broken by the irruption of a bustling newcomer, who, as he shook his dripping cap, cheerily cried, "Good Laur! it does come down!"
He looked round for acknowledgment, but the genteel gentlemen from London stonily stared into vacancy.
Undiscouraged, the newcomer took off his mackintosh, offered a jest about the weather, beamed cordially upon the crowd, and playfully cuffed the ears of the boy who demanded, "No d-r-r-rink, no d-r-r-rink for me."
"All right," he said, "if you don't want any drink, you needn't cry about it. I'll take your share when the whisky comes."
Again he glanced round with an inviting smile, but the petrified images looked remote, unfriendly, melancholy, slow.
But this chilliness troubled him no more than a frosty morning troubles the jovial sun. He beamed and glowed and laughed and talked, and, despite themselves, the genteel glaciers thawed.
"That man," I said to myself, "comes from the North."
His next speech told of storms he had seen--at Blackpool! of seas washing over the promenade wetting him "three streets back."
One of the gentlemen from London cast a look of curiosity.
The man from the North went on to tell how he had taken a day's sail from Blackpool, and, being unable to land there at night, had been carried to Fleetwood, and thence back by rail after midnight.
"How was that?" asked the gentleman who had looked interested; "haven't they a pier at Blackpool?"
Fancy that to a Blackpoolite! It was as if one had asked a sailor whether he had ever seen the sea, a Scotch reporter whether he had tasted whisky, a French soldier whether he had ever heard the "Marseillaise," or a Southport man whether he knew what sand was.
It did my heart good in that strange land upon that cheerless day to hear the man from the North pour out his volcanic eloquence in Blackpool's praise.
I grieve to be compelled to admit that some of his statements struck me as inaccurate. For instance, I thought he was wrong in describing the promenade as ten miles long, and I think he was not justified in stretching the Tower to double the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
I cast a glance of mild rebuke upon him when he added that the Winter Gardens were "something like the Crystal Palace, and Earl's Court put together," and I gasped when he represented Uncle Tom's Cabin as "a sort of shandygaff of Buckingham Palace and Olympia!".