Explore "The Inventor" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I had a day free between two lectures in the south-west of England, and / I spent it stopping at a town in which there was a large and very / comfortable old posting-house or coaching-inn. I had meant to stay some / few hours there and to take the last train out in the evening, and I / had meant to spend those hours alone and resting; but this was not / permitted me, for just as I had taken up the local paper, which was a / humble, reasonable thing, empty of any passion and violence and very / reposeful to read, a man came up and touched my left elbow sharply: a / gesture not at all to my taste nor, I think, to that of anyone who is / trying to read his paper.
I looked up and saw a man who must have been quite sixty years of age. / He had on a soft, felt slouch hat, a very old and greenish black coat; / he stooped and shuffled; he was clean-shaven, with long grey hair, and / his eyes were astonishingly bright and piercing and set close together.