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[97]
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
neighbor's--or an expedition to a county ball or the yeomanry
review--[98] 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[99] 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
certainly didn't seem to want them. There was the canal, by the way,
which supplied the country-side with coal, and up and down which
continually went the long barges with the big black men lounging by
the side of the horses along the towing-path, and the women in
bright-colored handkerchiefs standing in the sterns steering.
Standing, I say, but you could never see whether they were standing or
sitting, all but their heads and shoulders being out of sight in the
cozy little cabins which occupied some eight feet of the stern and
which Tom Brown pictured to himself as the most desirable of
residences. His nurse told him that those good-natured-looking women
were in the constant habit of enticing children into the barges and
taking them up to London and selling them, which Tom wouldn't believe,
and which made him resolve as soon as possible to accept the
oft-proffered invitation of these sirens[100] to "young master," to
come in and have a ride. But as yet the nurse was too much for Tom.

[96] #Jobbers#: speculators or members of corrupt political
rings.

[97] #Assizes or Quarter Sessions#: sessions of courts of
justice.

[98] #Yeomanry review#: a review of the county