Thomas A. Janvier

“ In all amity we bade farewell to our kindly chemist, but with finality: being well persuaded—as in regard to Saint Paul were them of Ephesus, but for other reasons—we should see his face no more. Then, down the High Street, we started on our breadless march.
"When the tale of bricks is doubled, Moses comes!" We had no more than got well out of Barrow, and shaken from off our feet the dust of it, when our luck turned. ”

“ Then she was for hurrying on again: but paused for a moment—good-heartedly caring for our small trouble in the thick of her own great one—to advise us to try the Red Lion; and to add that—if that rubescent beast failed us—the grocer on the High Street, "who sometimes fed trippers," might serve our turn.
Being human institutions, inns must take their share, of course, of human sorrows and anxieties; and in such seasons of misfortune must be permitted to subdue their public duties to their private pains. ”

“ Why—in view of our experience in tripping there—trippers ever should come to Barrow, I cannot imagine. Why—after being fed by the grocer—they never should trip back to it. I can imagine very easily indeed! All that he had to offer us was a dusty regale of soda biscuit—that even in our famishing we rejected: aghast at the Sahara notion of eating such arid morsels away from even so small an oasis as ginger ale.
Being thus at the end of our rope, we went back to the chemist. He was not in the least responsible, of course, for the way that Barrow was starving us ”

“ Save a lost-looking dog, and a melancholy grocer brooding in a very small grocery, no living creatures were visible. The squat little houses had the air of being dwelt in—their suburban trimness and trigness was one of our objections to them—but their dwellers lay so close that a Mexican town at midday never was more desert nor more still. ”

“ As amateur antiquarians, we were disposed to take kindly to the Red Lion. It was a little old ale-house, not an inn; and of a type that nowadays is found only in out-of-the-way nooks and corners of the land. ”

“ Not did any view of the situation modify its remnant essence: which was—to our utter discomfiture as explorers—that New Holland failed to exhibit even a rudimentary trace of its Dutch origin, and in every particular was as uninterestingly commonplace as it possibly could be!
I am never "for crying over spilt ideals. It is better to make new ones, and to take a fresh start. ”

“ Our Moses was an elderly philanthropist wearing extensible purple spectacles—they hinged around the corners of his eyes, and gave him a totally misleading look of dark malevolence—who came up behind us driving an empty brake. ”

“ Our landing was made (this was the first fly in our amber) at a very up-to-date railway pier—the train terminal of the Great Central's branch line to Hull—that extended far out from the low shore through the shallows; and as we walked landward we noted with some concern that—while on either side of the pier the anchorage for such vessels was excellent—not a schuyt anywhere was to be seen. We told each other, reassuringly, that the railway pier was a commendable innovation in the interest of practical convenience ”