penny, cutting the song off abruptly in the
middle. And she bolted and chained the door and sat down again.

Another pause.

'Well, well!' said Priscilla.

'Aye!' Toby agreed. 'Good coal that!'

'Fourteen shilling a ton!'

Another pause, and a longer.

'Is Ned Walklate still at th' Rose and Crown?' Toby asked.

'For aught I know he is,' said Priscilla.

'I'll just step round there,' said Toby, picking up his hat and rising.

As he was manoeuvring the door-chain, Priscilla said--

'You're forgetting your umbrella, Tobias.'

'No,' he answered. 'I hanna' forgotten it. I'm coming back.'

Their eyes met, charged with meaning.

'That'll be all right,' she said. 'Well, well!'

'Aye!'

And he stepped round to Ned Walklate's.

FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER

I

It is the greatest mistake in the world to imagine that, because the
Five Towns is an industrial district, devoted to the manufacture of
cups and saucers, marbles and door-knobs, therefore there is no luxury
in it.

A writer, not yet deceased, who spent two nights there, and wrote four
hundred pages about it, has committed herself to the assertion that
there are no private carriages in its streets--only perambulators and
tramcars.

That writer's reputation is ruined in the Five Towns. For the Five
Towns, although continually complaining of bad times, is immensely
wealthy, as well as immensely poor--a country of contrasts, indeed--and
private carriages, if they do not abound, exist at any rate in
sufficient numbers.

Nay, more, automobiles of the most expensive French and English makes
fly dashingly along its hilly roads and scatter in profusion the rich
black mud thereof.

On a Saturday afternoon in last spring, such an automobile stood
outside the garden entrance of Bleakridge House, just halfway between
Hanbridge and Bursley. It belonged to young Harold Etches, of Etches,
Limited, the great porcelain manufacturers.

It was a 20 h.p. Panhard, and was worth over a thousand pounds as it
stood there, throbbing, and Harold was proud of it.

He was also proud of his young wife, Maud, who, clad in several hundred
pounds' worth of furs, had taken her seat next to the steering-wheel,
and was waiting for Harold to mount by her side. The united ages of
this handsome and gay couple came to less than forty-five.

And they owned the motor-car, and Bleakridge House with its ten
bedrooms, and another house at Llandudno, and a controlling inter