Shall we ever forget the instant welcome that beamed from his benignant
face, or how he honored the draft upon him by immediately calling upon
all the members of our travelling-party? how literally, against all our
expostulations, he gave himself up to us, attending us to
picture-galleries and zoological gardens, insisting on disbursing the
entrance-fee for us all, with our unavoidable allowance at the moment,
and, on our exaction of a just reckoning with him at last, declining to
name the sum, on the unanswerable plea of an old man's poor and failing
memory! "Does the old man still live?" Surely he does the better life in
heaven, if his gray locks on earth are under the sod, and it is too late
for these poor lines to reach his eyes, for our sole repayment. Without
note, but only chance introduction, a similar case of disinterested
bounty in Liverpool from one of goodness undiscriminating as the Divine,
which gives the sun and rain to all, stood in strange contrast with the
reception of a Manchester manufacturer, almost whose only manifestation
in reply to the document we tendered was a sort of growl that _we could
see mills in Lowell like those under his own control_.
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