to Sproxton that Sunday afternoon. He always enjoyed his walk to
that out-lying hamlet; it took him (by a short cut) through a corner of Sir
Maximus Debarry's park; then across a piece of common, broken here and there
into red ridges below dark masses of furze; and for the rest of the way
alongside the canal, where the Sunday peacefulness that seemed to rest on the
bordering meadows and pastures was hardly broken if a horse pulled into sight
along the towing-path, and a boat, with a little curl of blue smoke issuing from
its tin chimney, came slowly gliding behind. Felix retained something of his
boyish impression that the days in a canal-boat were all like Sundays; but the
horse, if it had been put to him, would probably have preferred a more Judaic or
Scotch rigour with regard to canal-boats, or at least that the Sunday towing
should be done by asses, as a lower order.
    This canal was only a branch of the grand trunk, and ended among the
coal-pits, where Felix, crossing a network of black tram-roads, soon came to his
destination - that public institute of Sproxton, known to its frequenters
chiefly as Chubb's, but less familiarly as the Sugar Loaf or the New Pits; this
last being the name for the more modern and lively nucleus of the Sproxton
hamlet. The other nucleus, known as the Old Pits, also supported its public, but
it had something of the forlorn air of an abandoned capital; and the company at
the Blue Cow was of an inferior kind - equal, of course, in the fundamental
attributes of humanity, such as desire for beer, but not equal in ability to pay
for it.
    When Felix arrived, the great Chubb was standing at the door. Mr Chubb was a
remarkable publican; none of your stock Bonifaces, red, bloated, jolly, and
joking. He was thin and sallow, and was never, as his constant guests observed,
seen to be the worse (or the better) for liquor; indeed, as among soldiers an
eminent general was held to have a charmed life, Chubb was held by the members
of the Benefit Club to have a charmed sobriety, a vigilance over his own
interest that resisted all narcotics. His very dreams, as stated by himself, had
a method in them beyond the waking thoughts of other men. Pharaoh's dream, he
observed, was nothing to them; and, as lying so much out of ordinary experience,
they were held particularly suitable for narration on Sunday