Tales of the Five Towns

ld wear the mayoral chain of Bursley immediately, and added as its own private opinion that, in default of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chell and

followed by an amusing description of the procession of the geese, a descript

ight be, did not consort with that dignity. A certain Mayor of Longshaw, years before, had driven a sow to market, and derived a tremendous advertisement therefrom, but Bursley had no wish to rival Longshaw in any particular. Bursley regarded Longshaw as the Inferno of the Five Towns. In Bursley you were bidden to go to Longshaw as you were bidden to

were not, in fact, capable of logical justification; but they were there, they violently existed. It would have been useless to point out that if the inimitable Jos had not been called to the mayoralty the episode of the geese would have passed as a gorgeous joke; that everyone had been vastly amused by it until that

is antic was inexcusable, all were equally agreed to pretend that it was a mere trifle of no importance; you cannot deprive a man of his prescriptive right for a mere trifle of no imp

wife and the town. He was ashamed, overset. His procession of geese appeared to him in an entir

lea of his son's absence, spent eight hours a day at

cial conclave, and Josiah Topham

rket. It was also spread about that this treat would eclipse and extinguish all previous treats of a similar nature, and that it might be accepted as some slight foreta

into the drawing-room without enthusiasm to greet his wife, when

and he had always thereafter felt a kind of benevolent, good-humoured, contemptuous pity for Gordon-Gordon, whose life was a tragic blank; Gordon, who lived, a melancholy and defeate

' Gordon was saying-'really,

reated, with a seductive charm th

ere was

ll,' sai

nearly to Oldcastle, and returned about six o'clock. But Clara said no w

ing to the works, Mrs. Curtenty follo

ten-pound notes this afternoon, will