 twenty, he painted his first
considerable landscape, a tract of moorland on the borders of Lancashire and
Yorkshire. This was his native ground. At Sowerby Bridge, a manufacturing town,
which, like many others in the same part of England, makes a blot of ugliness on
country in itself sternly beautiful, his father had settled as the manager of
certain rope-works. Mr. Mallard's state was not unprosperous, for he had
invented a process put in use by his employers, and derived benefit from it. He
was a man of habitual gravity, occasionally severe in the rule of his household,
very seldom unbending to mirth. Though not particularly robust, he employed his
leisure in long walks about the moors, walks sometimes prolonged till after
midnight, sometimes begun long before dawn. His acquaintances called him
unsociable, and doubt less he was so in the sense that he could not find at
Sowerby Bridge any one for whose society he greatly cared. It was even a rare
thing for him to sit down with his wife and children for more than a few
minutes; if he remained in the house, he kept apart in a room of his own, musing
over, rather than reading, a little collection of books - one of his favourites
being Defoe's »History of the Devil.« He often made ironical remarks, and seemed
to have a grim satisfaction when his hearers missed the point. Then he would
chuckle, and shake his head, and go away muttering.
    Young Ross, who made no brilliant figure at school, and showed a turn for
drawing, was sent at seventeen to the factory of Messrs. Gilstead, Miles and
Doran, to become a designer of patterns. The result was something more than his
father had expected, for Mr. Doran, who had his abode at Sowerby Bridge, quickly
discovered that the lad was meant for far other things, and, by dint of personal
intervention, caused Mr. Mallard to give his son a chance of becoming an artist.
    A remarkable man, this Mr. Doran. By nature a Bohemian, somehow made into a
Yorkshire mill-owner; a strong, active, nobly featured man, who dressed as no
one in the factory regions ever did before or probably ever will again - his
usual appearance suggesting the common notion of a bushranger; an artist to the
core; a purchaser of pictures by unknown men who had a future - at the sale of
his collection three Robert Cheeles got into the hands of dealers, all of them
now the boasted possessions of great galleries; a passionate lover of music -
