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 labouring 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 rumour 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
neighbouring 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
pedlars, 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.
    Thus the mind of Frick was exactly of the sort for Mr. Solomon Featherstone
to work upon, he having more plenteous ideas of the same order, with a suspicion
of heaven and earth which was better fed and more entirely at leisure. Solomon
was overseer of the roads at that time, and on his slow-paced cob often took his
rounds by Frick to look at the workmen getting the stones there, pausing with a
mysterious deliberation, which might have misled you into supposing that he had
some other reason for staying than the mere want of impulse to move. After
looking for a long while at any work that was going on, he would
