Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/377

Rh The large company had dispersed in several excursions about the grounds and neighbourhood, when I arrived, and he alone seemed waiting within doors to receive new guests. He gave me the kindliest welcome, with his bland face still beaming with the sunlight of his benevolent heart, which he had just shed upon a little cold-water army of children who had come with their teachers from the Potteries to have a healthy, happy frolic in his great park. I regretted that I was not in time to see as well as hear him making a fatherly talk, in the Roger de Coverley style, to the gambolling flock of these boys and girls right from the smoke and smut of their district. I am sure no man could have made a more genial and pleasant speech to such children; or have spoken to their hearts more kindly with his face and eyes as well as with his voice. I was especially pleased to see in this incident a feature more admirable and beautiful than the romance of feudal hospitality which has been made so much of in the literature of novels. The hundreds of little folks assembled in this park were not to the manor born; they were not children of the baron's retainers, or of his tenants. They were all the children of working men entirely unknown to him, and living perhaps twenty miles away. He had not a village or town interest in them, or any local motive or relationship to gratify or discharge