orough of Port-Bredy, after having been a
living force therein for more than two hundred years.

CHAPTER IX

Twenty-one years and six months do not pass without setting a mark even
upon durable stone and triple brass; upon humanity such a period works
nothing less than transformation. In Barnet's old birthplace vivacious
young children with bones like india-rubber had grown up to be stable men
and women, men and women had dried in the skin, stiffened, withered, and
sunk into decrepitude; while selections from every class had been
consigned to the outlying cemetery. Of inorganic differences the
greatest was that a railway had invaded the town, tying it on to a main
line at a junction a dozen miles off. Barnet's house on the
harbour-road, once so insistently new, had acquired a respectable
mellowness, with ivy, Virginia creepers, lichens, damp patches, and even
constitutional infirmities of its own like its elder fellows. Its
architecture, once so very improved and modern, had already become stale
in style, without having reached the dignity of being old-fashioned.
Trees about the harbour-road had increased in circumference or
disappeared under the saw; while the church had had such a tremendous
practical joke played upon it by some facetious restorer or other as to
be scarce recognizable by its dearest old friends.

During this long interval George Barnet had never once been seen or heard
of in the town of his fathers.

It was the evening of a market-day, and some half-dozen middle-aged
farmers and dairymen were lounging round the bar of the Black-Bull Hotel,
occasionally dropping a remark to each other, and less frequently to the
two barmaids who stood within the pewter-topped counter in a perfunctory
attitude of attention, these latter sighing and making a private
observation to one another at odd intervals, on more interesting
experiences than the present.

'Days get shorter,' said one of the dairymen, as he looked towards the
street, and noticed that the lamp-lighter was passing by.

The farmers merely acknowledged by their countenances the propriety of
this remark, and finding that nobody else spoke, one of the barmaids said
'yes,' in a tone of painful duty.

'Come fair-day we shall have to light up before we start for home-along.'

'That's true,' his neighbour conceded, with a gaze of blankness.

'And after that we shan't see much further difference all's winter.'

The rest were not unwilling t