Welford

“ Layard, who gave himself no airs, but was always a pleasant gentleman, though he was not in the counting-house of the great Welford Gas Company, but in the works, where her own husband was employed.
"Why, don't you consider a man four inches taller than I a tall man?" cried Crawford, drawing brows down over his quick furtive eyes, and looking at the woman as if he was reproaching her with having committed a heinous crime. ”

“ The Western Champion quite misunderstands the circumstances under which poor Welford met his death, which, on the contrary, illustrate the necessity of the reform advocated by the Queenslander. I knew Welford personally, and was camped on his country, at the place he afterwards made his main camp, some three or four months before he occupied it with his cattle. He was a man who always got on well with the blacks, treating them justly and firmly ”

“ In all his life he never saw any girl so lovely as Hetty; and then look at the luck she had brought him! He would try Welford for a week or two--try the effect of Hetty's luck by playing every night for a fortnight. If he had won a good sum at the end of his trial, he should then be certain it was owing to Hetty. It would be easy to avoid Ray. He was engaged at his office until the afternoon. Every afternoon Crawford could leave Welford, go to the Counter Club, dine there, and not come back till morning. ”

“ When Francis Bramwell, on the morning Crawford left Welford for Richmond, found himself with little Freddie in his arms inside the gate of the timber-yard he set the child down, and having closed the gate, fetched little Frank out of the cottage.
The two children ran to one another. If they had been girls they would have kissed; being boys, they had things too weighty on their minds to allow of wasting time over such a frivolous and useless thing as kissing. ”

“ If any considerable sum of money was attached to the setting of the Thames on fire here was your man able and willing to undertake the feat.
When the afternoon came, and he found himself released from the drudgery of his desk, he hastened to Welford. Alfred Layard did not get home in the evening until eight o'clock, and, of course, Ray could not call at Crawford's House until after that hour. But he could go to the Ait, and who could say but Hetty might appear at the window, or even come out on Crawford's Quay? ”

“ The notion of a rival had never entered his head, and if any one had suggested such a thing he would have laughed the consideration of it to scorn. He admired Hetty intensely, and he meant to succeed, and succeed he would.
He lounged about Covent Garden for a good while, for he did not want to reach Welford until Layard had gone to the gasworks. Of course he should say his visit to Crawford's House was made with the purpose of seeing what progress had been made with the gates for the flooded ice-house. ”

“ The rest of Welford straggles along a broad street to the left, and presently ends obscurely in meadows leading to the river. Across field-paths one comes in this direction to the very out-of-the-world little village of Weston-on-Avon. The explorer who finds Weston feels like some member of the Geographical Society who has wandered in strange, outlandish parts and comes p. ”

“ Welby was one of those brilliant persons who adorn any society amidst which they are thrown. If at heart he was a disappointed man, the disappointment was concealed by an even serenity of spirits; he had entertained high and justifiable hopes of a brilliant career and a lasting reputation as a theologian and a preacher; the succession to his estate at the age of twenty-three had changed the nature of his ambition. ”

“ I cannot imagine what could prompt him to so wearisome an undertaking; but he says that adventures and a destiny so singular as mine ought not to be abandoned to forgetfulness like any vulgar and every-day existence. Besides, when he wrote it, he suspected that it might be necessary to the safety of my reputation and my life, from the consequences of my connection with Welbeck. Time has annihilated that danger. All enmities and all suspicions are buried with that ill-fated wretch. Wortley has been won by my behaviour, and confides in my integrity now as much as he formerly suspected it. ”

“ Since every market town and almost every village in the kingdom, could boast a Wellington house, or a Waterloo house, emulous to catch some gilded ray from the blaze of their great namesake's glory, it would have been strange indeed if the linendrapers and haberdashers of our good town of Belford Regis had been so much in the rear of fashion as to neglect this easy method of puffing off their wares. ”

“ Welburn. It's you who are exciting me with all this chattering and wanting me to remember this and remember that. You're doing me a great deal of harm, and I tell you what, if I don't know anything that happened in the past I do know what's going to happen in the future, and that is that I shall punch [70] your head in a minute if you ask me any more questions—so now! [Behaves as if he were mad] .
[He jumps up] .
Rector [retreating] . Oh, pray, dear sir, keep calm. [Trying to smile] . No need for you to punch my head or any one else's.
Welburn. I'm not so sure. ”

“ What does the gloomy pile of bones buried in the trenches of Waterloo think of this? England has been too modest to herself in her treatment of Wellington, for making him so great is making herself small. Wellington is merely a hero, like any other man. ”

“ From these thoughts I was recalled by a message from Welbeck. He gave me a folded paper, which he requested me to carry to No.—South Fourth Street. "Inquire," said he, "for Mrs. Wentworth, in order merely to ascertain the house, for you need not ask to see her; merely give the letter to the servant and retire. Excuse me for imposing this service upon you. It is of too great moment to be trusted to a common messenger; I usually perform it myself, but am at present otherwise engaged." ”

“ So great was the importance attached to this position that for seven years Henry had, for want of a sufficiently strong candidate, advisedly kept it open. [Pg 103] Welf took the Duchy—and then pursued his own course, defying the Emperor at Roncaglia, and refusing to render him service—which was politic and, according to the notions of his day, not dishonest.
Welf III. was the last Guelph of the male line. After him we find the Guelphs of the female branch succeeding to the family honours—the "Guelphs of Ravensburg," as they were fond of styling themselves. ”

“ And when it was known that Jeffreys would have had the good old man whipped at the cart's tail through London, had it not been that for once he was overborne by his brethren on the bench, a sense of horror and loathing arose in the minds of honest and merciful men, not only against the wicked Judge himself, but against the King who could smile approval on such a debauched servant, and actually associate him with Lord Guildford, the Keeper of the Seals, with the evident intention of promoting him still higher if he continued to go about his work in the same way. ”

“ You say he means to return; but of that I doubt. You will never see his face more. He is too wise to thrust himself again into the noose; but I do not utterly despair of lighting upon Welbeck. Old Thetford, Jamieson, and I, have sworn to hunt him through the world. I have strong hopes that he has not strayed far. Some intelligence has lately been received, which has enabled us to place our hounds upon his scent. He may double and skulk; but, if he does not fall into our toils at last, he will have the agility and cunning, as well as the malignity, of devils. ”

“ I feel it especially when I think of Wilford. His eyes attested so much; he would have enjoyed meeting him so keenly. No doubt he was already fond of the man, had loved him through his books, like so many others. If I had introduced him? If we had taken him with us the next morning, on our excursion to Cambo? Included him occasionally in our smokes and parleys?
Wilford left for England without dining again at the Hotel d'Angleterre. We were busy "doing" the country, and never chanced to be at Biarritz at the dinner-hour. During that week I scarcely saw Sir Richard Maistre. ”

“ The greatest difficulties could neither embarrass nor intimidate Wellington; his energy invariably rising in proportion to the obstacles to be surmounted. The patience, the firmness, the resolution, with which he bore through the maddening vexations and gigantic difficulties of the Peninsular campaigns, is, perhaps, one of the sublimest things to be found in history. In Spain, Wellington not only exhibited the genius of the general, but the comprehensive wisdom of the statesman. ”

“ Henry Walford.
Clement Walford! His name was on everybody's lips. The critics gave him columns in the papers, theatrical managers almost knelt at his feet, and paid eagerly the money he demanded to secure his services; society held open its doors, and the great actor entered at his ease. And Henry? A struggler—nothing more; a disappointed struggler. Clever, but unknown; gifted, but unheard of. His brother's success may have cut him, but it never discouraged him. He laboured on, still hopeful. Whilst the popular man was rich in London, the other was hovering on the very edges of poverty. ”

“ The ancient city of Guildford owes its name and much of its historic renown to its situation on the chief ford of the river Wey, which here makes a break in the ridge of chalk downs running across Surrey. Guildford is mentioned in his will by King Alfred, who left it to his nephew Ethelwold, and became memorable as the spot where another Alfred, the son of Knut and Emma, was treacherously seized and murdered by Earl Godwin, who, standing on the eastern slope of the Hog’s Back above the city, bade the young prince look back and see how large a kingdom would be his. ”

“ I did not immediately suspect how this man's prudence and indefatigable attention to his own interest should allow him to become the dupe of Welbeck.
"What," said I, "is old Thetford's claim upon Welbeck?"
"It is a claim," he replied, "that, if it ever be made good, will doom Welbeck to imprisonment and wholesome labour for life."
"How? Surely it is nothing more than debt."
"Have you not heard? But that is no wonder. Happily you are a stranger to mercantile anxieties and revolutions. ”

“ Wellingsford was my little world. I knew everybody in it. I had grown to regard myself as the repository of all its gossip. The fraction of it that I retailed was a matter of calculated discretion. I made a little hobby—it was a foible, a vanity, what you will—of my omniscience. I knew months ahead the dates of the arrivals of young Wellingsfordians in this world of pain and plenitude. I knew of maidens who were wronged and youths who were jilted; of wives who led their husbands a deuce of a dance, and of wives who kept their husbands out of the bankruptcy court. ”

“ And many other strange tales were told of Welland the smith: how he had once made a boat from the single trunk of a tree, and had sailed in it all around the mid-world; how, being lame in one foot, he had forged a wondrous winged garment, and flown like a falcon through the air; and how he had wrought for Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon hero, a gorgeous war-coat that no other smith could equal. [EN#28] And so pleasantly did Welland entertain his guests that they were loath to leave him ”

“ There was no difficulty in persuading the world that Welbeck was a personage of opulence and rank. My birth and previous adventures it was proper to conceal. The facility with which mankind are misled in their estimate of characters, their proneness to multiply inferences and conjectures, will not be readily conceived by one destitute of my experience. My sudden appearance on the stage, my stately reserve, my splendid habitation, and my circumspect deportment, were sufficient to entitle me to homage. ”

“ Your young Newbold would have been worth bringing up once, but he has never learned not to be afraid, and that brings it about that he has parted with every good quality he possesses except his brain. That is still with us, fortunately, for, quite between us, in spite of patriotism, I must say there are not many brains in active employment in Westbury in these days (I’m not, of course, so impolitic as to say ‘in these days’ to anyone but you, Henry!) . We have about half-a-dozen brains in Westbury capable of conversation,—yours and young Newbold’s and mine, I forget the other three! ”

“ She fastened her eyes upon the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo, the statesman of the hour, the most commanding figure in the three kingdoms. Wellington was then sixty-five, a man covered with honor and absorbed in public affairs. But, to Miss Jenkins, he was simply a great worldly figure, and, in 1834, she wrote a letter--a letter winged by many prayers--warning him of the peril of living without a sure, deep consciousness of the forgiveness of sins, through the redemption of Jesus Christ. Wellington's iron nature was strongly moved. ”

“ Johnny’s father and mother were both dead and buried, therefore the boy lived with his grandfather, and assisted the old man in his business.
As our hero journeyed to the market with his wood, he often met young Master Woolcrop riding by on his milk-white pony, with a tall groom following on a fine charger, standing I don’t know how many hands high; and I am sorry to say our little hero grew very envious; for, be it known, young Woolcrop’s father was one of the richest men in New South Wales, while Johnny’s grandfather had not enough cash to purchase a set of harness for the old mare. ”