ient borough had succeeded in forcing the
greatest railway line in England to run through unpopulated country five
miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it loathed the mere
conception of a railway. And now, people are inquiring why the Five
Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterised by a
perhaps excessive provincialism. These interesting details have
everything to do with the history of Edwin Clayhanger, as they have
everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred thousand
souls in the Five Towns. Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of
its sublime stupidity.

It was a breezy Friday in July 1872. The canal, which ran north and
south, reflected a blue and white sky. Towards the bridge, from the
north came a long narrow canal-boat roofed with tarpaulins; and towards
the bridge, from the south came a similar craft, sluggishly creeping.
The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for, in the way of
rain, that year was breaking the records of a century and a half.
Thirty yards in front of each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse
floundered its best in the quagmire. The honest endeavour of one of the
animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven who
heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs. The ragged
and filthy child danced in the rich mud round the horse's flanks with
the simple joy of one who had been rewarded for good behaviour by the
unrestricted use of a whip for the first time.

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TWO.

Edwin, with his elbows on the stone parapet of the bridge, stared
uninterested at the spectacle of the child, the whip, and the skeleton.
He was not insensible to the piquancy of the pageant of life, but his
mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters. He had left school
that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a
willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the
advance guard of its problems bearing down on him. Slim, gawky, untidy,
fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders
in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and on his
bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had
the extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity which marks
most boys of sixteen. It seemed rather a shame, it seemed even tragic,
that this naive, simple