Finding himself temporarily at liberty before affairs of a pressing nature required his presence in the north of the country, Mr Headstone took advantage of the occasion to visit the town of his birth and pay his respects to his aged parents, who - still hale and hearty despite their advancing years - enjoyed the robust pleasures of country living. Accordingly, the school master descended from the coach at the noon staging post and - charting his course by the distant church spire just as a mariner finds a guide in the north star - set out across the fields.
Anyone who has returned to the scene of their childhood after an absence of many years cannot help but grow sentimental at the sight of familiar landmarks, which, by their very association with the jumbled memories of the past, recall to mind the adventures of youth. So it was with Mr Headstone as he approached the town. Here was the stile from which he had fallen into the hawthorn hedge - there was the field across which he had been pursued by an angry bull - here the weir in which he had almost drowned - there the apple tree from whose highest branch he had plummeted without ceremony into a forest of stinging nettles. He passed by the draper's yard, where once a black dog - like Cerberus - had terrorised any individual foolhardy enough to stray within the compass of the chain that attached the beast to its kennel. Outside The Rose and Crown he stopped to gaze upon the horse trough in which the town roughs had regularly demonstrated to him the difficulties commonly encountered in respiration when one is immersed head first into water. He stood on the very corner where the beadle had struck him on the head with the staff of his office in the mistaken belief that repeated blows with a hard object would assist in his education.
Is it any wonder, with so many memories flooding the banks of his soul, that Mr Headstone should be overcome with emotion? Should we wonder then that on gaining the hearth and home of his aged parents, Mr Headstone should - after performing the appropriate filial salutations - make a line directly for the kitchen cupboard where from past experience he knew there to be a bottle of cooking sherry? Let us simply observe that at times we are masters of our emotions, and at other times our emotions are masters of us.
Mr Charles Dickens
