ABSTRACT
Mr Clover was really Lord Polperro himself: or if: rather, he was not a mysterious Quodling, of Quodling Brothers, who sometimes is the cousin, and sometimes the half-brother, of that erring lord. But it scarcely matters, for when Mr Clover is finally tracked down by Gammon, the plot entirely disappears in hurried journeys between Sloane-street, Streatham, and Ludgate-hill; and the reader, completely out ofbreath, feels relieved when Polperro (or Clover), still explaining nothing, dies quickly of exhaustion in a brawl outside St Paul's Cathedral. After this Gammon has a free hand to marry Mrs Clover, and a very nice woman she is, while Polly (the auburn-haired lodger of the fray) takes up with another lover, who has won £550 by guessing the word 'hygiene.' (The 'missing-word competition' craze is introduced here with capital effect.) Although the story matters little in The Town Traveller, there is briskness and vivacity, a good-humoured tolerance of weaknesses, and a rough-and-ready kind of reward dealt out to honesty, which keep the attention fixed, and are not unworthy treatment of the ground traversed half-a-century ago by Charles Dickens.
