You must lean from the window to catch sight of the black river flowing
beneath, upon which the Brewery was built; of the great wherries and
barges unloading below; to see the canoes and pleasure boats, escaping
from the polluted waters, the bricks and mortars of the locality, to the
sunlit stream flowing between fair gardens and green pastures of the
country, a half-mile farther on.
From a window in one of the black, ill-looking wharves across the way an
imprisoned lark was singing, rewarding man for his cruel treatment with
the best he had to give, after the manner of the brute creation, whose
avenging is not yet. A ray of sunlight straggling in--in more open, more
favoured localities, the sun lay broadly over all on that spring
morning--touched the face of Sir Francis, which wore a by no means
well-pleased expression. In the paper he was reading, wet from the press,
was an account of a steeplechase in which his brother's name had largely
figured. He had not won the race, nor distinguished himself in any way,
except by the number and severity of his falls, and the fact that he had
killed his horse; but the _Brockenham Star_ was, to a large extent, the
property of the firm of big brewers, and had therefore made the most of
the young man's exploits.
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