But the slower wits, such as Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Waule, who both

occupied land of their own, took a long time to arrive at this

conclusion, their minds halting at the vivid conception of what it

would be to cut the Big Pasture in two, and turn it into three-cornered

bits, which would be "nohow;" while accommodation-bridges and high

payments were remote and incredible.

"The cows will all cast their calves, brother," said Mrs. Waule, in a

tone of deep melancholy, "if the railway comes across the Near Close;

and I shouldn't wonder at the mare too, if she was in foal. It's a

poor tale if a widow's property is to be spaded away, and the law say

nothing to it. What's to hinder 'em from cutting right and left if

they begin? It's well known, I can't fight."

"The best way would be to say nothing, and set somebody on to send 'em

away with a flea in their ear, when they came spying and measuring,"

said Solomon. "Folks did that about Brassing, by what I can

understand. It's all a pretence, if the truth was known, about their

being forced to take one way. Let 'em go cutting in another parish.

And I don't believe in any pay to make amends for bringing a lot of

ruffians to trample your crops. Where's a company's pocket?"

"Brother Peter, God forgive him, got money out of a company," said Mrs.

Waule. "But that was for the manganese. That wasn't for railways to

blow you to pieces right and left."

"Well, there's this to be said, Jane," Mr. Solomon concluded, lowering

his voice in a cautious manner--"the more spokes we put in their wheel,

the more they'll pay us to let 'em go on, if they must come whether or

not."

This reasoning of Mr. Solomon's was perhaps less thorough than he

imagined, his cunning bearing about the same relation to the course of

railways as the cunning of a diplomatist bears to the general chill or

catarrh of the solar system. But he set about acting on his views in a

thoroughly diplomatic manner, by stimulating suspicion. His side of

Lowick was the most remote from the village, and the houses of the

laboring people were either lone cottages or were collected in a hamlet

called Frick, where a water-mill and some stone-pits made a little

centre of slow, heavy-shouldered industry.

In the absence of any precise idea as to what railways were, public

opinion in Frick was against them; for the human mind in that grassy

corner had not the proverbial tendency to admire the unknown, holding

rather that it was likely to be against the poor man, and that

suspicion was the only wise attitude with regard to it. Even the rumor

of Reform had not yet excited any millennial expectations in Frick,

there being no definite promise in it, as of gratuitous grains to

fatten Hiram Ford's pig, or of a publican at the "Weights and Scales"

who would brew beer for nothing, or of an offer on the part of the

three neighboring farmers to raise wages during winter. And without

distinct good of this kind in its promises, Reform seemed on a footing

with the bragging of pedlers, which was a hint for distrust to every

knowing person. The men of Frick were not ill-fed, and were less given

to fanaticism than to a strong muscular suspicion; less inclined to

believe that they were peculiarly cared for by heaven, than to regard

heaven itself as rather disposed to take them in--a disposition

observable in the weather.




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