They had many a chat over a counter, making and receiving enquiries about friends, opening their mouths at any lively piece of news, and pursing them sympathetically when there was trouble around the door. In the low shops with the new windows in their old walls and new slates on their bowed roofs, little, low doorways stooping for their heads, little, worn doorsteps watching for their feet, they heard many a hint of the romance of evolving or changing trade, many a precious historic touch that would never find its way into print. You cannot put your ear to the past anywhere but in the old places where men are born to their trades, where they know the customer’s pedigree as the customer knows theirs, and where everybody has time for the human as well as the commercial exchange. Only there can you learn in the space of an hour wonderful things about drapery and furniture and hardware and tea, and feel the glamour of the whole budding and fruit-bearing earth come into the florist’s, and the atmosphere of old posting-inns into the pot-shop with the clink of glass. And no man who is born to his trade is ever a cobbler who may not look beyond his last. The potman will tell you where to order a stylish suit of clothes, and the florist instruct you how to smoke a ham. And every one of them will tell you, with or without their knowing it, what they have learned of human nature and the hope of eternity in their quiet little town, and with what eyes they have looked abroad upon the world. All that morning the tides of life swept against Sarah and her friend as they went about the streets,--tides of humanity and sympathy, memory and custom,--all the currents that move in the air and the blood and the brain when a hand is shaken or a friendly voice is heard. It was life at its fullest as it is known to the northern farmer and his kind, the public recognition in a given place of the great and intimate system of which he is a part. The dumb beasts had their place in it, too,--perhaps the chief place,--and though only the wise dogs and the cobby, half-clipped horses were there in the flesh, the all-absorbing stock was never absent from the mind. Into every conversation before so long some grand bull-calf or pedigree shearling was sure to push its way. Moving among the warm human tides was like moving in a flood, while, overhead, low almost as the roofs, the mist drifted and the sky drooped. Seven miles away, the sands lay bare as a hand, as if never in any æon of time would the sea return.