This legend, one sees, reflects from a far-off time the visitation of the floods, which even when they left human life untouched, were widely fatal to the helpless cattle, and swept as sudden death over all smaller living things.But the town knew worse troubles even than the floods: troubles of the civil wars when it was a continual fighting place where first puritans thanked God for the blood of the loyalists and then loyalists thanked God for the blood of the puritans.Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for conscience sake in those times and went forth beggared from their native town.Doubtless there are many houses standing now on which those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow: quaint gabled houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses and penetrated by surprising passages, which turn and turn at sharp angles till they lead you out on a muddy strand overflowed continually by the rushing tide.Everywhere the brick houses have a mellow look and in Mrs Glegg's day there was no incongruous new-fashioned smartness, no plate-glass in shop-windows, no fresh stucco facing, or other fallacious attempt to make fine old red St Ogg's wear the air of a town that sprang up yesterday.The shop windows were small and unpretending, for the farmers' wives and daughters who came to do their shopping on market days, were not to be withdrawn from their regular, well-known shops; and the tradesmen had no wares intended for customers who would go on their way and be seen no more.Ah, even Mrs Glegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated from us by changes that widen the years.
War and the rumour of war had then died out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by farmers in drab greatcoats who shook the grain out of their sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a state of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were high.Surely the time was gone for ever when the broad river could bring up unwelcome ships: Russia was only the place where the linseed came from - the more the better - ****** grist for the great vertical millstones with their scythe-like arms, roaring and grinding and carefully sweeping as if an informing soul were in them.The Catholics, bad harvests, and the mysterious fluctuations of trade were the three evils mankind had to fear: even the floods had not been great of late years.
The mind of St Ogg's did not look extensively before or after.It inherited a long past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for the spirits that walked the streets.Since the centuries when St Ogg with his boat and the Virgin Mother at the prow had been seen on the wide water, so many memories had been left behind and had gradually vanished like the receding hill-tops!
And the present time was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday and the giant forces that used to shake the earth are for ever laid to sleep.
The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it: the Catholics were formidable because they would lay hold of government and property, and burn men alive; not because any sane and honest parishioner of St Ogg's could be brought to believe in the Pope.One aged person remembered how a rude multitude had been swayed when John Wesley preached in the cattle-market, but for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men.An occasional burst of fervour in dissenting pulpits on the subject of infant baptism was the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times when men had done with change.Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of schisms, careless of proselytism: dissent was an inheritance along with a superior pew and a business connection, and Churchmanship only wondered contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that clung greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing.But with the Catholic Question had come a slight wind of controversy to break the calm: the elderly rector had become occasionally historical and argumentative, and Mr Spray the Independent minister had begun to preach political sermons in which he distinguished with much subtlety between his fervent belief in the right of the Catholics to the franchise and his fervent belief in their eternal perdition.But most of Mr Spray's hearers were incapable of following his subtleties, and many old-fashioned dissenters were much pained by his `siding with the Catholics'; while others thought he had better let politics alone.Public spirit was not held in high esteem at St Ogg's, and men who busied themselves with political questions were regarded with some suspicion as dangerous characters: they were usually persons who had little or no business of their own to manage, or, if they had, were likely enough to become insolvent.
This was the general aspect of things at St Ogg's in Mrs Glegg's day and at that particular period in her family history when she had had her quarrel with Mr Tulliver.It was a time when ignorance was much more comfortable than at present, and was received with all the honours in very good society, without being obliged to dress itself in an elaborate costume of knowledge:
a time when cheap periodicals were not, and when country surgeons never thought of asking their female patients if they were fond of reading, but simply took it for granted that they preferred gossip: a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore large pockets in which they carried a mutton bone to secure them against cramp.Mrs Glegg carried such a bone, which she had inherited from her grandmother with a brocaded gown that would stand up empty, like a suit of armour, and a silver-headed walking-stick; for the Dodson family had been respectable for many generations.