; Co., brewers of the celebrated Treby beer. Wace & Co. did
not stand alone in the town as prosperous traders on a large scale, to say
nothing of those who had retired from business; and in no country town of the
same small size as Treby was there a larger proportion of families who had
handsome sets of china without handles, hereditary punchbowls, and large silver
ladles with a Queen Anne's guinea in the centre. Such people naturally took tea
and supped together frequently; and as there was no professional man or
tradesman in Treby who was not connected by business, if not by blood, with the
farmers of the district, the richer sort of these were much invited, and gave
invitations in their turn. They played at whist, ate and drank generously,
praised Mr Pitt and the war as keeping up prices and religion, and were very
humorous about each other's property, having much the same coy pleasure in
allusions to their secret ability to purchase, as blushing lasses sometimes have
in jokes about their secret preferences. The rector was always of the Debarry
family, associated only with county people, and was much respected for his
affability; a clergyman who would have taken tea with the townspeople would have
given a dangerous shock to the mind of a Treby church-man.
    Such was the old-fashioned, grazing, brewing, wool-packing, cheese-loading
life of Treby Magna, until there befell new conditions, complicating its
relating with the rest of the world, and gradually awakening in it that higher
consciousness which is known to bring higher pains. First came the canal; next,
the working of the coal-mines at Sproxton, two miles off the town; and, thirdly,
the discovery of a saline spring, which suggested to a too constructive brain
the possibility of turning Treby Magna into a fashionable watering-place. So
daring an idea was not originated by a native Trebian, but by a young lawyer who
came from a distance, knew the dictionary by heart, and was probably an
illegitimate son of somebody or other. The idea, although it promised an
increase of wealth to the town, was not well received at first; ladies objected
to seeing objects drawn about in hand-carriages, the doctor foresaw the advent
of unsound practitioners, and most retail tradesmen concurred with him that new
doings were usually for the advantage of new people. The more unanswerable
reasons urged that Treby had prospered without baths, and it was yet to be seen
how it would prosper with them; while a report that the proposed name for them
was