But the slower wits, such as Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Waule, who both
occupied land of their own, took a long time to arrive at this
conclusion, their minds halting at the vivid conception of what it
would be to cut the Big Pasture in two, and turn it into three-cornered
bits, which would be "nohow;" while accommodation-bridges and high
payments were remote and incredible.
"The cows will all cast their calves, brother," said Mrs. Waule, in a
tone of deep melancholy, "if the railway comes across the Near Close;
and I shouldn't wonder at the mare too, if she was in foal. It's a
poor tale if a widow's property is to be spaded away, and the law say
nothing to it. What's to hinder 'em from cutting right and left if
they begin? It's well known, I can't fight."
"The best way would be to say nothing, and set somebody on to send 'em
away with a flea in their ear, when they came spying and measuring,"
said Solomon. "Folks did that about Brassing, by what I can
understand. It's all a pretence, if the truth was known, about their
being forced to take one way. Let 'em go cutting in another parish.
And I don't believe in any pay to make amends for bringing a lot of
ruffians to trample your crops. Where's a company's pocket?"
"Brother Peter, God forgive him, got money out of a company," said Mrs.
Waule. "But that was for the manganese. That wasn't for railways to
blow you to pieces right and left."
"Well, there's this to be said, Jane," Mr. Solomon concluded, lowering
his voice in a cautious manner--"the more spokes we put in their wheel,
the more they'll pay us to let 'em go on, if they must come whether or
not."
This reasoning of Mr. Solomon's was perhaps less thorough than he
imagined, his cunning bearing about the same relation to the course of
railways as the cunning of a diplomatist bears to the general chill or
catarrh of the solar system. But he set about acting on his views in a
thoroughly diplomatic manner, by stimulating suspicion. His side of
Lowick was the most remote from the village, and the houses of the
laboring people were either lone cottages or were collected in a hamlet
called Frick, where a water-mill and some stone-pits made a little
centre of slow, heavy-shouldered industry.
In the absence of any precise idea as to what railways were, public
opinion in Frick was against them; for the human mind in that grassy
corner had not the proverbial tendency to admire the unknown, holding
rather that it was likely to be against the poor man, and that
suspicion was the only wise attitude with regard to it. Even the rumor
of Reform had not yet excited any millennial expectations in Frick,
there being no definite promise in it, as of gratuitous grains to
fatten Hiram Ford's pig, or of a publican at the "Weights and Scales"
who would brew beer for nothing, or of an offer on the part of the
three neighboring farmers to raise wages during winter. And without
distinct good of this kind in its promises, Reform seemed on a footing
with the bragging of pedlers, which was a hint for distrust to every
knowing person. The men of Frick were not ill-fed, and were less given
to fanaticism than to a strong muscular suspicion; less inclined to
believe that they were peculiarly cared for by heaven, than to regard
heaven itself as rather disposed to take them in--a disposition
observable in the weather.