Almost his first experience of pleasure and independence had been those two years’ travel in the Far West. Pleasure in that particular instance had brought him face to face with death, but was counted pleasure nevertheless. After doing America, he had done as much of the old world as he happened to feel interested in doing, not scampering round the globe in ninety days like Mr. Cook’s excursionists, but taking an autumn in Norway, a winter in Rome, a spring in Greece, a summer in Sweden, and so on, until he began to feel, in his own colloquial phrase, that he had used up the map of Europe. Apart from his passion for the lovely concert-singer, Mrs. Bertram, which was strong enough to have sustained his energies had the siren sought to lure him to the summit of Mount Everest, he really enjoyed this scamper from one provincial town to another, these idle days spent in sleepy old cities, which were as new to him as any unexplored region in central Europe. The great dusky cathedrals or abbey-churches into which he strolled before breakfast, careless but not irreverent; and where he sometimes found white-robed curates and choristers chanting the matin service; the empty square, where the town-pump and a mediæval cross had it all to themselves, except on market-days; the broad turnpike-road beyond the High-street, where, perhaps, an avenue of elms on the outskirt of the town testified to the beneficent care of some bygone corporation not quite destitute of a regard for the picturesque; these things, which repeated themselves, with but little variety, in most of the towns he explored, were not without a certain mild interest for Mr. Hossack. He would gaze in wondering contemplation upon those handsome red-brick houses at the best end of the High-street, those respectable middle-class houses which every one knows, and of which every English town can boast, no matter how remote from the fever of that commerce which makes the wealth of nations. Houses whose windows shine resplendent, without stain or blemish of dust, smoke, or weather; houses on whose spotless doorstep no foot seems to have trodden, whose green balconies are filled with geraniums more scarlet than other geraniums, and on whose stems no faded leaf appears; houses whose sacred interior—archtemple of those homelier British virtues, ready money and soapsuds—is shrouded from the vulgar eye by starched muslin curtains pendant from brazen rods; houses at which the taxgatherer never calls twice, doors whose shining knockers have never trembled in the rude grasp of a dun.