several daily coaches. The High Street was discovered to be too

tortuous for theseawakening energies, and a new road cut off its

worst contortions. Residential villas appeared occupied by retired

tradesmen and widows, who esteemed the place healthy, and by others

of a strange new unoccupied class of people who had money invested

in joint-stock enterprises. First one and then several boys'

boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from London,-my

grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to the north-

west, was making itselffelt more and more.

But this was only the beginning of thegrowth period, the first

trickle of the coming flood of mechanical power. Away in the north

they were casting iron in bigger and biggerforms, working their way

to the production of steel on a large scale, applying power in

factories. Bromstead had almostdoubted in size again long before

the railway came; there was hardly any thatch left in the High

Street, but instead were houses with handsome brass-knockered front

doors and several windows, and shops with shop-fronts all of square

glass panes, and the place was lighted publicly now by oil lamps-

previously only one flickering lamp outside each of the coaching

inns had broken the nocturnal darkness. And there was talk, it long

remained talk,-of gas. The gasworks came in 1834, and about that

date my father's three houses must have been built convenient for

the London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of thereal

suburban quality; they were let at first to City people still

engaged in business.

And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal;

there was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the

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