The one person in the village who could remember his coming to Harpledon, and opening and repairing the old Cranch house (for his family had been India merchants when Harpledon was a thriving sea-port)—the only person who went back far enough to antedate Waldo Cranch was an aunt of mine, old Miss Lucilla Selwick, who lived in the Selwick house, itself a stout relic of India merchant days, and who had been sitting at the same window, watching the main street of Harpledon, for seventy years and more to my knowledge. But unfortunately the long range of Aunt Lucilla’s memory often made it hit rather wide of the mark. She remembered heaps and heaps of far-off things; but she almost always remembered them wrongly. For instance, she used to say: “Poor Polly Everitt! How well I remember her, coming up from the beach one day screaming, and saying she’d seen her husband drowning before her eyes”—whereas every one knew that Mrs. Everitt was on a picnic when her husband was drowned at the other end of the world, and that no ghostly premonition of her loss had reached her. And whenever Aunt Lucilla mentioned Mr. Cranch’s coming to live at Harpledon she used to say: “Dear me, I can see him now, driving by on that rainy afternoon in Denny Brine’s old carry-all, with a great pile of bags and bundles, and on top of them a black and white hobby-horse with a real mane—the very handsomest hobby-horse I ever saw.” No persuasion could induce her to dissociate the image of this prodigious toy from her first sight of Waldo Cranch, most incurable of bachelors, and least concerned with the amusing of other people’s children, even those of his best friends. In this case, to be sure, her power of evocation had a certain success. Some one told Cranch—Mrs. Durant I think it must have been—and I can still hear his hearty laugh. “What could it have been that she saw?” Mrs. Durant questioned; and he responded gaily: “Why not simply the symbol of my numerous tastes?” Which—as Cranch painted and gardened and made music (even composed it)—seemed so happy an explanation that for long afterward the Cranch house was known to us as Hobby-Horse Hall.