to popular prejudice Edward Henry had fire-grates in his house, and
fires therein during exceptionally frosty weather; but this did not
save him from being regarded in the Five Towns as in some ways a
peculiar soul.) The effulgent source of dark heat was scientifically
situated in front of the window, and on ordinarily cold evenings
Edward Henry and his wife and mother, and an acquaintance if one
happened to come in, would gather round the radiator and play bridge
or dummy whist.

The other phenomena of the drawing-room which particularly interested
Edward Henry were the Turkey carpet, the four vast easy-chairs, the
sofa, the imposing cigar-cabinet and the mechanical piano-player.
At one brief period he had hovered a good deal about the revolving
bookcase containing the _Encyclopaedia_ (to which his collection
of books was limited), but the frail passion for literature had
not survived a struggle with the seductions of the mechanical
piano-player.

The walls of the room never drew his notice. He had chosen, some years
before, a patent washable kind of wall-paper (which could be wiped
over with a damp cloth), and he had also chosen the pattern of the
paper, but it is a fact that he could spend hours in any room without
even seeing the pattern of its paper. (In the same way his wife's
cushions and little draperies and bows were invisible to him, though
he had searched for and duly obtained the perfect quality of swansdown
which filled the cushions.)

The one ornament of the walls which attracted him was a large and
splendidly-framed oil-painting of a ruined castle, in the midst of a
sombre forest, through which cows were strolling. In the tower of the