I had arranged by letter to spend the last few weeks of the Long Vacation in Northumberland or walking on the Border with Piers Debourg. He met me at the station and we went up to his suburb on the trolley-bus.
As we turned into Northumberland Street the broad sunlight blazed on the gilt of the only landmark I have in Newcastle.
"It always seems to me," said I, "one of the more whimsical eccentricities of the English character that this black, bleak city, this soul-constricting agglomeration of granite and grime, where the people seem to have been born with overcoats on their backs and Rechabitism in their hearts, should have erected for its tutelary deity a figure of Caligulan luxury: a naked, golden girl. I can never quite believe it. Does anyone else ever see it, I wonder? And yet once, I suppose, the design for it must have been passed by a sober and completely-clothed Board of Directors. How? I wonder. Did some mad journeyman of the Northern Goldsmiths' Company cast a spell on the Board and beguile them with a dream he had of the Emperor's workshops in Byzantium? Or did some incredible, top-hatted, dundrearied Director return from an Eastern tour haunted by the image of a goddess poised in a marble portico between golden sun and violet sea there where the light wave lisps Greece? Or was it a moralist who posed her there above the clock to say to thoughtless youth, "Behold, pleasure passeth but gold endureth"?
"Or Beauty escapes from the bonds of Time," suggested Piers in a tone implying that he could fit you a moral to any fable from stock. "Hasn't it occurred to you that it might be the last wild nymph of Northumberland bagged by the Chairman after lunch on that memorable Twelfth of August in 1866?"
"I might question the strict accuracy of that 'bagged'," I said. "But there's one insuperable objection to nymphs in Northumberland, and that's your climate. If you insist on classical fauna I'll go so far as to allow you satyrs, because satyrs are comfortably accommodated with hair breeches, but I never saw a nymph that I'd call really adequately attired to stand up to your confounded nethering East wind."
"They might have been migrants," said Piers. "Summer visitors like swallows. Your objection wouldn't hold this summer. Northumberland's as hot as Arcady. In fact, why shouldn't they hibernate and only come out in exceptional summers? Wouldn't you say a sun like this might lure more than one sort of shy creature out of hiding?" He looked at me rather oddly and laughed. "That's a possible materialistic explanation which I put forward, not very seriously, to account for something curious I've got to show you."
That stopped my speculations about the golden girl, but before I could find out what was on Piers's mind we had arrived at the stop near his house. He jumped up and clattered down the steps as the trolley-bus slowed down....
