“Death of Nelson,” suggested an onlooker, laughing, as he observed the attitude and the knee-breeches. “If he had only a crown of thorns ...” said another, pleased by the group. “Wants a bit of skilly and real hard work,” said a third. CHAPTER VII A RAILWAY CARRIAGE--SURREY--SUSSEX I left London as quickly as possible. The railway carriage was nearly full of men reading the same newspapers under three or four different names, when a little grizzled and spectacled man of middle age entered--a printer, perhaps--with a twisted face and simple and puzzled expression that probably earned him many a laugh from street-corner boys. As he sat down he recognized a sailor, a tall, ponderous, kind-faced man made in three distinct storeys, who supported his enormous red hands upon knees each fit to have been the mould of a hero’s helmet. “Well, I never did, and how are you, Harry?” They looked at one another kindly but with a question piercing through the kindness and an effort to divine the unknowable without betraying curiosity. The kindness did, in fact, melt away the almost physical obstacle of twenty years spent apart and in ignorance of one another. “When did you leave the old place?” said the sailor. “Soon after you did yourself, Harry; just after the shipwreck of the _Wild Swan_; twenty-one, twenty-two--yes, twenty-two years ago.” “Is it so long? I could have sworn you had that beard when I saw you last,” and the sailor looked at him in a way that showed he had already bridged the twenty-two years and knew the man. “Yes, twenty-two years.” “And do you ever go back to the old place? How’s Charlie Nash, and young Woolford, and the shepherd?” “Let me see----” “But how is Maggie Looker?” broke in the sailor upon a genial answer in the bud. “Oh, didn’t you know? She took ill very soon after you went away, and then they thought she was all right again; but they could not quite get rid of the cough, and it got bad in the winter, and all through the spring it was worse.” “And so she died in the summer.” “So she did.” “Oh, Christ! but what times we had.” And then, in reminiscences fast growing gay--the mere triumph of memory, the being able to add each to the other’s store, was a satisfaction--they told the story of a pretty country girl whom they had quarrelled over until she grew too proud for both; how heavy was her hair; how she could run, and nobody was like her for finding a wasps’-nest. Her boldness and carelessness filled them with envy still. “I reckon we old ones would call her a tomboy now,” said the sailor. “I should say we would.” “Now, I wonder what sort of a wife she would have made?” “Hum, I don’t know....” “Do you remember that day her and you and me got lost in the forest?” “Yes, and we were there all night, and I got a hiding for it.” “Not Maggie.” “Not poor Maggie.” “And when we couldn’t see our way any more we lifted her up into that old beech where the green woodpecker’s nest was.”