RUMMAGING at a bargain-counter, I came across an object which puzzled me, and, turning to the shopman, I asked him what it was. He took it up contemptuously. “That,” he said. “Dear me, I thought I’d put it in the dust-bin. It’s fit for nothing but destruction.”

“And you call it?” I persisted. “I call it by its name,” he said. “It’s an outworn passion, and a pretty frayed one too. Look at that!”

I watched him pull gently at the passion and it came apart like mildewed fabric. “There’s no interest in that,” he said. “That never led to a murder or a divorce, a feeble fellow like that. If it ever got as far as the First Offenders’ Court, I shall be surprised.”

“Yet it looks old,” I said. “In its youth, perhaps—”

He examined it more closely. “I don’t think it’s a love passion at all,” he said, shaking his head. “My suppliers are getting very careless.”

“You wouldn’t care to give me their address?” I coaxed.

He threw the passion down angrily. “This is a shop,” he said. “I’m here to sell, not to make presents of my trade secrets.”

I apologized. “Of course,” I said, “I will always deal through you. And as to this passion, what is the price of that?”

“I’m an honest man and to tell you the truth I’d rather put that in the dust-bin than sell it. It goes against the grain to be trading in goods that I know won’t satisfy.”

I said things such as that I would take the risk, that I would not hold him responsible for any disappointment the passion might cause me and I ended by offering him sixpence. So taken was he by the generosity of this offer that he not only accepted it, but insisted on my taking, as discount, a piece of newspaper which, he said, would serve very well to wrap round the passion, pointing out, truthfully, that it was a cleanish piece of paper, neither stained, by nor stinking of fried fish.

So we struck that bargain, and leaving the shop, which I have never found again, I carried the passion home and unwrapped it from the paper and put it on the table in my study. After a time, when it was accustomed to its new surroundings, it showed unmistakably that it wished to be friendly with me. At its age, I gathered, and in its outworn condition, it thought fit to be grateful to me for having purchased it at so great a price. The shopman was right; it was not a love passion, it was a hate passion, but superannuated now, and if I cared to watch it carefully it promised that I should see from the first all that happened: how this hate which was so very strong a hundred years ago had died and was now turned to such corruption and kindliness that, before it fell utterly to pieces, it was to show me its career. To me it seems that the story of this hate falls, like the hymns, into two parts, ancient and modern, and I think it properest to begin by telling you the ancient part first. Hates that are to live a hundred years are not born in a day, so I shall first tell you how Reuben Hepplestall turned from petty squire to cotton manufacturing and you will see later for yourselves why this hate began.

HEPPLESTALL’S