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Chapter the Tenth
Miriam Revisited
I
One summer afternoon about five years after his first coming to the
Potwell Inn Mr. Polly found himself sitting under the pollard willow
fishing for dace. It was a plumper, browner and healthier Mr. Polly
altogether than the miserable bankrupt with whose dyspeptic portrait
our novel opened. He was fat, but with a fatness more generally
diffused, and the lower part of his face was touched to gravity by a
small square beard. Also he was balder.
It was the first time he had found leisure to fish, though from the
very outset of his Potwell career he had promised himself abundant
indulgence in the pleasures of fishing. Fishing, as the golden page of
English literature testifies, is a meditative and retrospective
pursuit, and the varied page of memory, disregarded so long for sake
of the teeming duties I have already enumerated, began to unfold
itself to Mr. Polly's consideration. A speculation about Uncle Jim
died for want of material, and gave place to a reckoning of the years
and months that had passed since his coming to Potwell, and that to a
philosophical review of his life. He began to think about Miriam,
remotely and impersonally. He remembered many things that had been
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