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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. What is that curt'sy worth,?or those dove's eyes Which can make gods forsworn!?I melt, and am not Of stronger earth than others I Shakspeare. Though Sir Richard Norman's wild adventures had often beguiled him so far beyond the narrow pale of fashionable society, that he was apt to fancy the world known to him in all its aspects, high and low, rich and poor, tatters and brocade, a new page in the volume of life was unfolded to him at the factory. To have traced his beloved Matilda to a cottage, and raised her from the picturesque rusticity of hawthorns and a thatched roof, to the splendours of Selwood Manor, would have been an act of poetical justice. But, alas! the sooty establishment of Messrs. Maule, Cruttenden, Wickset, and Co. proved an anti-climax to every high-wrought aspiration of his soul. Situated at the extremity of a dirty suburb, the huge ill- painted gates stood so near a tanner's yard that the fury excited among Mr. Maule's squadron of mastiffs by the sudden stopping of Sir Richard's curricle, called forth the sympathetic rage of the tanner's yelping regiment of curs. And when the stranger pushed his way along an avenue formed by two lofty, dingy walls, and discovered, at the extremity, a gloomy-looking brick house, facing an extensive range of buildings which in aspect resembled a penitentiary, and in smell, the London gas-works, his disgust was complete. A squalid-looking individual, arrayed in paper cap, fustian drawers, and a dirty, ragged shirt, whom he beckoned from a pump, undertook to acquaint Mr. Maule that a gentleman wished to speak with him; and Sir Richard paced impatiently up and down beside a range of coalsheds, sickened by the smell of engine-grease, and stifled with the smother of the furnaces, till he was accosted by a...