The coach from railhead to Chipstone was an hour and a half late, and not all the flourish of its horn as it thundered into the courtyard of “The Black Sheep” could disguise the fact. Not that it was the fault of the coach: it had waited for the mail train, and this, for those parts, parvenu monster had found an obstruction on the line, and was helpless to go round it, as the driver and the guard complacently pointed out. Their glory and their tips were shrunk like their circuit—unchanged along the short route, they could no longer prod the slumbering traveller with insinuatory farewells: they knew themselves, these Chipstone worthies, a last lingering out-of-the-way survival of the old order, doomed like the broad coaching road and the old hostelries to decay; already they had seen the horned guard decline in places to the omnibus cad, even as the ancient “shooter” of highwaymen had sunk to the key-bugler; yet they preserved the grand manner before the revolution that was deposing them—the Tom Pratt and Dick Burrage of a generation of travellers—and while dispensing their conversation like decorations and drinking your health as a concession, they retailed with gloomy satisfaction every railway collision and holocaust, as though coaches never overturned, and declared the English breed of horses would be ruined. And when certain lines set up third-class carriages they denounced the cruelty of packing the poor in roofless, seatless trucks, as though they themselves had never brought into port frost-bitten peers or dames sodden through their oilskin umbrellas.

But to-day “Powerful warrum” was the grumble of the passengers, even of those on the roof, the majority being—thus early in May—still smothered in box-coats; as for the unfortunates compressed inside, who had likewise not yet cast a clout, and had similarly mistrusted the sunshiny spell with which that pouring April had ended, they mopped their brows and cursed the fickle British climate. But though the sun had suddenly become hot enough to sour milk, it could not sour the temper of the bronzed young man—his face nigh as ruddy as his hair—who sat on the box-seat and conversed with Tom Pratt almost as an equal. Even the long delay on the line had left him unruffled, thanks largely to the blue-eyed girl in the train who before his clean-shaven cosmopolitan air had shown signs of tenderness, and whose address his purse now held—more precious than a fiver. Verily a pleasant change after the Eveless back-blocks of Canada.

And the idea of calling this “warrum”! He smiled to think of the hells he had known—Montreal with mosquitoes, New York in a damp heat. Why, this couldn’t even melt a man’s collar. And how refreshing was the trimness of the Essex countryside—the comfortable air of immemorial cultivation—after the giant untidiness of the New World. How soothing these long, green, white-sprinkled hedgerows with their ancient elms, this old, historic highway with thatch and tile, steeple and tower, after the corduroy roads of round logs or the muddy, dusty, sandy tracks. How adorable these creeper-covered cottages after log-cabins in backwoods; rotting floors on rotten sleepers and the mud paste fallen out of the walls. He forgot that it was precisely this that he had fled from nearly a decade ago—this dead, walled-in life, so petty and pietistic—and he congratulated himself afresh on the wisdom of that abrupt resolution to sell his clearing to a second-hand pioneer and to farm at home with the profits.

His clothes alone would have kept him in good humour. Not only were the heavier in what he had learned to call his trunk, but those on his back were the first he had ever had made to measure. And they were made too—like the neckcloth and shawl and fal-lals he was bringing to his parents “from America”—by the world-famous firm of “Moses & Son” (opposite Aldgate Church), whose imposingness was enhanced in his eyes by finding it—on the Saturday he first hied thither—haughtily aloof: a blank wilderness of shutters in a roaring world, with no gleam through their chinks from the seven hundred gas-burners. But he had finally stormed the “Private Hall,” toiling—as invited by rhyme—up “the stairs of solid oak,” and had gained the heights “where orders were bespoke,” and there—in that rich-carpeted “showroom with the giant chandelier,” in a setting of Corinthian columns, sculptured panels, and arabesque ceilings—dark enchanters with tape-measures like serpents over their shoulders had made obeisance to him and enfolded him with their coils. Even his billycock hat verified the bardic boast:

Left to himself he would have liked a wideawake, but that arbiter elegantiarum, the small boy, he was warned, had not quite acquiesced in that. If it was not a coat of many buttons that he now sported, it was scrimp enough to show off the fine lines of his figure; for the movement towards ample waistcoats and wide trousers was not yet encouraged by his Aldgate mentors, and pockets on the hips had been conceded him with reluctance. In his large American trunk reposed a still grander suit of Sunday sable, though he had shied at a frock coat, and was glad to learn from these hierophants of the mode that morning jackets were no longer confined to the stable-yard or the barrack-room, but were permissible even in the country house—and there was no question but Frog Farm was that. He had already worn his blacks once, on his visit to the Great Exhibition, and they made, he found, a distinct difference to the policemen in top-hats whose guidance he sought in the labyrinths of the metropolis.

The delay in this visit to the Exhibition—the goal of his journey to London—had turned out an advantage, he felt, giving him time for these measured elegancies. If he had been unable to be in at the opening, as he had grandly designed in Canada when ignorant that this involved guineas and season-tickets, he had managed to squeeze for a glimpse of the Queen outside if not inside the Park, and the first five-shilling day—after all, only the fourth—was grandeur enough for a whilom ploughboy and cabin-boy. Although nine ten-pound notes made a warm waistcoat-lining, he was not under the illusion that he had returned with more than a competence.

One would have thought London itself a Greater Exhibition to a young man who had never seen it before: especially London at carnival with its colossal crowds swollen by visitors from all countries in all complexions and costumes: London with its numberless gay ’buses (plying mostly to Hyde Park), its swifter gliding cabriolets of the new pattern invented by Mr. Hansom, and the more stolid procession of four-wheeled clarences, not to mention the fashionable and civic carriages with the scarlet-and-gold pomp of flunkeys and outriders: London with its countless curious street-criers, costermongers, ballad-mongers, watercress sellers, muffin and hot-pie men, birdcage dealers, tract-peddling Lascars in white robes, and vendors of everything from corn-salves to speeches on the scaffold; blowsy, rowdy London that turned into a dream-city when those strange figures with rods glided through the twilight, flecking the long, grey streets with points of fire.

But though Will Flynt was not insensitive to these fascinating phenomena, and even rode about recklessly in the cabriolets at eightpence a mile, yet London had not the spell to hold him. Only the Great Exhibition had drawn him across the Atlantic. While awaiting impatiently for the five-shilling day, he duly did the Tower and the Zoo (sixpence extra for Mr. Gould’s humming-birds in the twenty-five glass cases), paid twopence to go into St. Paul’s, and a shilling to see the Great Globe in Leicester Square, patronized Phelps at Sadler’s Wells, and the horses at Astley’s, had a peep at Vauxhall, enjoyed “Rush, the Norwich Murderer,” at Madame Tussaud’s, and submitted the boots these operations begrimed to the red-coated shoeblacks of the Ragged Schools—London’s new word in philanthropy. But though he liked the quarter in which his quaint galleried hotel, “The Flower Pot,” was situated, with the Spitalfields Market and the tall old houses of the silk-weavers, whose vast casements with their little panes rose story on story, he was no sooner through with the visit to the Exhibition than without a day’s delay—as promised in that letter to Martha—he took train and coach to Little Bradmarsh.

Beholding him thus on the County Flyer hurrying towards Frog Farm, after only a single visit to the stupendous spectacle, one may suspect that he did not know his own heart as well as he imagined. But he himself had no doubt of the magnet he obeyed, and he had found on his boat not a few rich Canadians—and the Dominion already boasted four thousand carriage-folk—who confessed to have yielded to the same irresistible attraction. There was indeed little else talked of on the voyage: even the wonders of the boat itself—a new Yankee iron and screw steamer of nearly two thousand tons and quite five hundred horse-power that brought them to Liverpool in eleven days from Halifax, and had spittoons and wedding-berths like the Yankee river-steamers, and to see which the Liverpudlians had flocked with their sixpences—paling before the world-marvel awaiting them in London.

And London itself was talking of it no less: for once London was staggered. And if London was thus shaken, how much more the provinces and the world at large? Did not indeed the flags of all nations wave over the great glass building, whose mere material would have been enough to set the globe agog, even if it had not contained contributions from every corner of civilization except Germany, which in that antediluvian age figured in the catalogue only as “The States of the Zollverein.” What wonder if with all the excursions and alarums and millennial visions that attended its birth, the Press reeking with paragraphs, poems, discussions, wrangles, skits, prophecies, and forebodings, crowds equal to the population of provincial towns gathered at the Park to watch it rise, and to stare at the endlessly inrolling vans and the sappers and miners at work in their uniforms. One M.P.—military and moustachio’d—won the immortality of the comic prints by fulminating against the invasion of Freethinking foreigners who would pillage London and ruin the honour of British womanhood: more sober minds feared the Chartist mobs and the Red Republicans: even the Catholics, already flaunting their cardinals and ringing their unhallowed church bells, would profit by the Continental wave. The House of Lords resounded with protests and petitions against the profanation of the Park, and apprehensions as to the fate of the building erected therein were equally rife: the great glass roof would be splintered by hailstones, the walls would be overturned by the wind, the galleries would collapse under the swarming multitudes, and Anarchism would seize its opportunity amid the dismantled treasures of the globe. But one unfailing factor was on the Exhibition’s side: the scheme was attacked by the Times. And so Paxton’s building rose steadily till the great day when through an avenue of three-quarters of a million spectators the Queen and “that Queen’s indefatigable husband”—as a panegyrist of the period put it—drove to declare it open to the elect thirty thousand who had already found it so, while through glittering nave and transept, with their fountains, trees, flowers, and statues, the “Hallelujah Chorus” thundered from a thousand voices, two hundred orchestral instruments, and a dozen giant organs; and the millennial hope welled up in a grand climax of universal emotion. And hoary grandsires should hereafter tell—proclaimed the poet of the Great Catalogue—what in this famous century befell: grey Time should chronicle the victories gained, since Mercy o’er the world and Justice reigned:

But although our Canadian pioneer had thus ample excuse for the unrest that forbade him to miss this Messianic spectacle, it was not—even he would have admitted—the Great Exhibition which had first unsettled his stolid labours. That oscillation had been communicated some two years earlier, and by a shock that had set the New World rattling even more noisily than the Old was shaken by the Great Exhibition. The discovery of gold in California was a seismic vibration that depopulated Eastern towns, shot sober lawyers into wagons, sent clergymen flying along mule-trails, swept timid tradesmen across the foodless and robber-haunted Rocky Mountains, whirled schoolmasters fifteen thousand miles round Cape Horn, and dumped them all waist-high in auriferous mud and shimmering water, to be fed by Indian squaws. It was under the lure of the Californian legend that Will had originally looked about for a purchaser of his cleared acres. But by the time the farm was off his hands, the glamour of easy gold had faded, and with a sum in his pockets sufficient for a little respite, life seemed suddenly larger than lucre, and he found himself possessed by a strange craving not to be away from the old country in that year of years—the year of the Great Exhibition.