post-office
and his horses dropped to a walk. I fancy that he glanced at me
apologetically; but since there was comparatively little danger
hereabouts I thought it more delicate to look the other way.

"And the Chamber of Commerce has not protested?" I asked.

We call it the "Chamber of Commerce" for euphony's sake. It is in fact
an association which keeps an eye upon the Parish Council, Harbour
Board, and Great Western Railway, and incites these bodies to make our
town more attractive to visitors. It consists mainly of lodging-house
keepers, and has this summer prevailed on the Railway Company to issue
cheap Saturday market tickets to Plymouth--a boon which the visitor will
soon learn (if we may take our own experience as a test) to rank high
among the minor comforts of life.

No; the Chamber of Commerce had not protested. And yet it occurred to
me more than once during the next few days that strangers attracted to
Troy by its reputation as a health resort must have marvelled as they
walked our streets, where cases of sunstroke, frost-bite, snake-bite,
and incipient croup challenged their pity at every corner. The very
babies took their first steps in splints, and when they tumbled were
examined by their older playmates, and pronounced to be suffering from
apoplexy or alcoholic poisoning, as fancy happened to suggest.
I believe that a single instruction in the Association's Handbook--
carefully italicised there, I must admit--alone saved our rising
generation. It ran: "_Unless perfectly sure that the patient is
intoxicated, do not give the emetic_."

To be sure, we left these extravagances to the children. But childhood,
after all, is a relative term, and in Troy we pass through it to sober
age by nice gradations; which take time. Already a foreign sailor who
had committed the double imprudence of drinking heavily at the Crown and
Anchor, and falling asleep afterwards on the foreshore while waiting for
his boat, was complaining vigorously, through his Vice-Consul, of the
varieties of treatment practised upon his insensible body; and only the
difficulty of tracing five Esmarch bandages in a town where five hundred
had been sold in a fortnight averted a prosecution. I was even prepared
for a visit from Sir Felix Felix-Williams, our worthy Squire, who seldom
misses an opportunity of turning our local enthusiasms to account, and
sometimes does me the honour to enlist my help; but scarcely for the
turn his sug