en by his nurse
to witness it, at the mature age of three years. Tom was the eldest
child of his parents, and from his earliest babyhood exhibited the
family characteristics in great strength. He was a hearty strong boy
from the first, given to fighting with and escaping from his nurse, and
fraternizing with all the village boys, with whom he made expeditions
all round the neighbourhood. And here in the quiet old-fashioned
country village, under the shadow of the everlasting hills, Tom Brown
was reared, and never left it till he went first to school when nearly
eight years of age,--for in those days change of air twice a year was
not thought absolutely necessary for the health of all Her Majesty's
lieges.

I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the
various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies, those gigantic jobbers
and bribers, while quarrelling about everything else, agreed together
some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of Medicine, body
and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which
they continually distribute judiciously amongst the Doctors, stipulating
only this one thing, that they shall prescribe change of air to every
patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see
their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that
none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty
years ago,--not a bit of it. The Browns didn't go out of the county once
in five years. A visit to Reading or Abingdon twice a-year, at Assizes
or Quarter Sessions, which the Squire made on his horse with a pair of
saddle-bags containing his wardrobe--a stay of a day or two at some
country neighbour's--or an expedition to a county ball, or the yeomanry
review--made up the sum of the Brown locomotion in most years. A stray
Brown from some distant county dropped in every now and then; or from
Oxford, on grave nag, an old don, contemporary of the Squire; and were
looked upon by the Brown household and the villagers with the same sort
of feeling with which we now regard a man who has crossed the Rocky
Mountains, or launched a boat on the Great Lake in Central Africa. The
White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by no great road; nothing but
country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one coach ran there, and
this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western part of the
Vale was without regular means of moving on, and