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History of America, by R. Mackenzie, and Aunt Crocker had given it to him. Though Mr. Solly had never been to America, he liked to read its history. He thought of this history in his own manner of thinking as inspired, believing every word of the particular account that the book gave him. ‘America stopped,’ thought Mr. Solly, ‘where the history ended.’ Solly could never have brought himself to see America, as so many do, as a wide chess-board sort of prairie, with Noah’s ark trees, and cities like so many high hats, put about in the fields. Mr. Mackenzie certainly told him of a very different place to that. Although Solly believed that America was still inhabited by people, yet had he gone there he would have certainly expected to see the old order still in being.
    â€˜There are texts there that will please you,’ Aunt Crocker had said. Solly thought so too, and he liked the Americans for what they had been, and for what they had done. He saw them in the past as written large—as interesting people should be—by Mr. Mackenzie; not in the mocking learned way that modern historians tap old barrels of former days, drawing them dry, but with the modest reserve of a wise man who lets a character step into a page and go his ways.
    Solly opened his book. The Madder honey that he had eaten for his dinner had tasted as lovely as the white pinks smelt. He thought of Deborah Crocker with befitting gratitude, and wished to see what some one in America had been doing. He opened upon a good man. His name was Roger Williams. He was a clergyman—‘godly and zealous.’
    Solly was glad to have met him. He felt sure that Mr. Williams would have liked his aunt, and when he knelt down on the grass to smell the white pinks before going out, he told them softly that ‘Roger was a clergyman.’
    Mr. Solly suited Madder well enough. He fell into its ways as soon as he came there. He liked Mr. Tucker, the Dodderdown clergyman who preached in Madder on Sunday afternoons, and who used to be, when she lived, a friend of Mrs. Crocker’s. He also liked Farmer Barfoot’s little brown and spotted pigs that ran grunting, in a high state of excitement, in the lanes.
    At Madder, Solly was more often called ‘Mrs. Crocker’s nephew’ than Mr. Solly; because the man who brought the furniture to Gift Cottage had given that name to him, telling Mr. Billy, whom he stopped to speak to, ‘There do go Mrs. Crocker’s nephew behind load, same as me lame dog do run.’
    And so when Mr. Solly mentioned his aunt, he did no more than what the people expected. But when Pim and Chick heard him come outwith a text from his book, they put him down as being a better-informed person in the way of the world than a mere ‘Aunt Crocker’s nephew’ was likely to be.
    No one in Madder is ever liked for what they are, but always for something that belongs to them; some oddity like the farmer’s lame foot, that is nearer than a possession, and is easier to understand than the man himself, who is ever a mystery, not to Madder folk alone, but to wise Solomon in Jerusalem too. Mr. Solly had two strings to his bow: his aunt’s words, that he so well remembered, and his texts. He either went with his aunt or with the Americans. And whichever of the two he spoke from, his words were always listened to with attention by Madder gossips, and a remark would follow at the end of them, such as, ‘They Americans bain’t all b—— fools,’ or else, ‘Thik Solly’s wold aunt, she were a woman.’ So carefully did Madder avoid committing itself.

Chapter v
‘SUNSHINE DO BURN’
    M R. S OLLY , happy because he felt what a good man Roger must have been, opened gently—so that it shouldn’t bang—the white gate of Gift Cottage and went out. He walked through the Madder lanes, now and again looking up at the hedges and green trees as if he thanked