Chapter X: Oliver’s Notion of Good Citizenship

OLIVER got into a habit of standing in his shop-door, leaning against one or other of the door-posts. He stood there to keep his weaknesses well in hand, as a declaration of war against all promulgators of recognised theories of gentility, and as a proclamation of fraternity and equality to his brother-shopkeepers. If he had known it, he was rather a striking figure at the station he had chosen. He was a Saul among the people. His shoulders were only rounded by his own shrugs. His complexion was fresh and slightly weather-beaten, neither tanned into leather nor baked into paste, nor faded into a girlish delicacy. His hands, when he took them out of his pockets, were the unbroadened, unflattened, well-kept hands of a man who for a period of years has handled books chiefly, and only plied an oar or a foil, and carried a rod or a gun, by way of that variety which has saved his fingers from becoming either slender or plump. His feet showed the effect of contact with the wares of a higher order of bootmaker than any known in Friarton. The clothes Oliver had bought and paid for from an Oxford tailor were not worn out, and though he meant to replace them by the work of a Friarton tailor in all its integrity, it was not to be supposed that even then he would be able to prevent an imitative townsman doing his best to copy the University ‘cut;’ so that Oliver, in spite of himself, would still wear suits which were a faint reflection of the coats of the disciples of Poole.

Oliver was standing in this guise at his shop-door the next time he saw the Stanhopes; and Harry called out again in the same tone of cheerful curiosity, ‘I say, Constable, what are you about there?’

After his former experience, Oliver was pleased to find that now he did not change colour—by the ghost of a shade. He simply moved a quarter of an inch to enable himself to glance up at the sign above his head, and call the Stanhopes’ attention to it—especially to the glittering spot where the Christian name ‘Peter’ had been erased and replaced by ‘Oliver.’ ‘Was reading not included in your education?’ he enquired, lazily.

It was Harry who grew red, gaped and stopped short, while Horace looked sharply from the sign to Harry to get his cue from his prompter. ‘Come, now,’ stammered Harry, taken aback as he was, and speaking out impulsively according to his wont, ‘this is too much to make us cram. You don’t mean to say you’re a——’

‘A baker as well as a miller,’ suggested Oliver, with a laugh; ‘just so. I wish I could say I was keeping shop—I am hardly good for so much—but I’m looking after the premises and my business in a general way.’

Harry stared, and then he swallowed the camel at a gulp, bursting out into a laugh on his own account as he accomplished the feat. ‘All right, old fellow,’ he took it upon him to assure Oliver; ‘I grow the corn and you complete the process, not merely by grinding it, but by going a step farther and converting it into food for man as well as for beast—why should the service to the beast be regarded as more honourable than that to the man? As well keep a shop here as a store in Adelaide or Victoria. Look here, Constable, invite us in and give us a tip of tarts.’

‘No,’ said Oliver, ‘my customers are the genuine article, and pay for what they get—all save an exceptional small maid or man in rags, who may be caught looking hungrily in at the windows. Your coats are as good as mine, and I’ll swear you’ve had an excellent breakfast on kidneys or mutton chops sufficient to spoil your youthful appetite for tarts for some hours to come. But I’ll send one of my carts, in its rounds, to call at the Farm and supply you with bread, if you like to give me the order.’

‘And he expects us to say we are obliged to him for proposing to furnish us with his goods on his own terms, and on short credit, no doubt! We’ll see him hanged first, Horry. Is there any other baker in the town, less of a wretched screw, that we can favour with our custom? though of course we shan’t trust your report. I’ll tell you what, Constable, we’ll run handicaps—my corn against your bread.’

‘You had better grow your crop first.’

‘Oh! never fear.’

Oliver could not help being amused by Harry Stanhope’s manner of taking the discovery. The older man was touched a little, too, by the lad’s staunchness to his new colours, his honest if spasmodic efforts to accommodate himself to a changed order of things, in direct opposition to every standard and watchword of the past, and to all the traditions of his youth.

Upon the whole the new-comers, Harry Stanhope with Horace in his wake, behaved a great deal better—Fan would have said in vindication of their birth and breeding—than nearly the entire upper ten long resident in Friarton, on Oliver Constable’s declining to avail himself of their permission and his own power to join their order. Harry received the shock, made up his mind to it, and went on as if nothing had happened, and everything was the same as before. If Constable chose to be a baker, of all trades, let him. For that matter, who could hinder him? and what did it signify? Harry took it fully for granted that Constable might still preserve all the claims he had ever had to being a gentleman. Certainly Harry had not been in the habit of reckoning bakers gentlemen, though he had known great brewers who were granted the ‘Open sesame’ by his people. But he had enough modesty left to own he and his people might have been mistaken in their partial and arbitrary estimate. Unquestionably it helped Harry greatly in his judgment to be sensible that he himself continued a gentleman, in spite of his idle talk of going down in the social scale and sinking his coat of arms and all ‘the humbug’ of his former station, in the plain style and title of Harry Stanhope, yeoman.

The Wrights and Fremantles of Friarton said among themselves that Oliver Constable had disappointed, nay, cheated them, in permitting them to extend to him the right-hand of fellowship on false premises. True, he had taken University honours as had been predicted of him, but he was about to degrade these honours by sinking them in trade of the most plebeian description. The fact was race, like murder, would out. Young Constable came of generations of millers and bakers, instead of masters of grammar schools and the like, and he must perforce return to the hereditary calling with its substantial profits. It had not been in scholarship to save him from his natural destiny.

Notwithstanding their just displeasure, Oliver’s old allies and patrons did not at once give him the cut direct, to his face. As Mrs. Hilliard had shrewdly defined the position, he could not rid himself in a moment of the independent fortune his father had left him, and of his university training. His going into trade might be a mere passing skit, like the freaks of some other University men tinged with the craze of doing something, at once out of the common and communistic, which distinguished a few of the young scholars and geniuses of the era; or it might be a simple step to winding up the business and getting rid of it; or it might be feeling Oliver’s way to popularity with some dim notion of getting into Parliament at a later date. If so, though the fellow might be a dreaming scheming fool for his pains, it would be a totally different kind of folly, which society could not afford to condemn severely. And a mistake might be awkward. The Fremantles and Co. could not be altogether sure of the motive at work, and, like politic people, they were disposed to temporise and refrain for a while from compromising themselves strongly. In addition the Friarton magnates wondered a little how Constable would get on, how he would manage to combine qualifications which the Wrights and Fremantles were accustomed to consider far apart. In the dearth of sources of social interest and excitement, Oliver’s former friends retained a great curiosity, in the middle of their indignation and disgust, with regard to his proceedings. Therefore ladies and gentlemen greeted him in his new character blandly at first, and even made half-jesting allusions to his having become what the speakers termed courteously a ‘business man,’ just hinting that he would be a _rara avis_ among the common shopkeepers at Friarton. The Wrights and Fremantles showed that it would not be their fault if they did not drop young Constable—supposing they were compelled to drop him—by imperceptible degrees, and with a gentle decorum and consideration both for themselves and him.

But Oliver would not consent to be treated as a spectacle for men and angels. When he found he was to be smilingly stared at, pumped dry, and rallied, he broke off, rashly perhaps, his intercourse with his old masters, and Fan, who had shown she was capable of bridling her own pride and compelling it to go in harness, could not, in the middle of her mortification, conquer her sore pride for Oliver so as to make any effectual resistance to the renunciation of their connection with professional and better-bred Friarton. Before Harry Stanhope had appeared on the scene to change the current of her ideas and reinspirit her, she had given in gloomily to Oliver’s determination to decline the few and wary invitations extended jointly to the brother and sister after Oliver’s return home, by the heads of the best houses in Friarton. The would be hosts and hostesses took the unsatisfactory couple at their word with a rapidity that savoured of relief.

‘The Constables know their own place best, after all,’ said the high contending faction among themselves, with admirable candour. ‘We are not going to force them to continue to come to our houses, when they may have felt themselves not at home all the time, though we did what we could to put these young persons at their ease.’

‘Constable has grown up an awkward brutally abrupt fellow, full of angles and crotchets. He has nothing conciliatory about him,’ said Mr. Fremantle, who was himself eminently gliding in his progress through the world. ‘I don’t believe now, that he would ever get over his original disadvantages—clever as he undoubtedly is—in a different sphere. So, no doubt, he judges wisely in falling back into the old track, where he may be as rude and overbearing as he likes. Probably we erred in tempting him from it, though it seemed a pity that talents like his should be wasted in a mill and bakehouse.’

‘And you know, my dear,’ said Mrs. Fremantle, who was by temperament caressing, and in the absence of other channels for her social affectionateness, became necessarily the bosom friend of Mrs. Wright, though the two were only sympathetic on class grounds, ‘good schools have not done everything for Miss Constable.’

‘Yes,’ answered Mrs. Wright. But in spite of her assent she was a tiresome woman, in doubt about everything, given to argue the conclusiveness of the plainest proposition. Thus she immediately turned and contended. ‘But they were excellent schools. The plain old father, and the brother with more ambitious views in those days, made a good selection. Miss Constable was at a school at Norwood, where my cousin Constantia’s daughters went afterwards, and she left it for Madame Fléchier’s in Brussels, where Miss Hilliard’s nieces the Cholmondeley girls finished their education. By-the-by,’ added Mrs. Wright, in fresh helpless uncertainty, ‘they count some relationship with the Constables.’

‘In a slightly nearer degree than we all do through Adam,’—Mrs. Fremantle put up her chin impatiently. ‘It is only a whim of darling Mrs. Hilliard’s to acknowledge it. As for Miss Constable’—the lady took up the broken thread of her discourse—‘she is so cold and stiff, she has got into such a habit of repressing herself—I suppose from having been compelled to hold the other shopkeepers at arm’s length, it is a positive effort to maintain an acquaintance with her; and where is the use, when she will never let herself out so that one has no chance of knowing her any better? It would be cruel to tease the Constables further by going on—trying to draw them away from their old set, which is quite respectable in its way. They may really be happier in it, education or no education. We have given them the opportunity of coming among us, and if we do not suit them, there is no more to be said. Of course we shall still be on bowing and speaking terms, which may be a little awkward when it leads to nothing more—otherwise I daresay it is all for the best.’

Fan writhed under what she guessed of this result, and Oliver grinned at it. But neither of the two did anything, after they had set the ball moving, to prevent the catastrophe.

The single reservation in the sentence which consigned the Constables once more to the Coventry of vulgar allies, occurred in the case of Mrs. Hilliard. Her house was, as in the beginning, the neutral ground on which the relapsed tradespeople could still encounter the professional circle. Mrs. Hilliard had proclaimed her blood-relationship with the Constables, while it was a point of honour with her to assert openly her interest in the most distant of her kindred. She announced now with the greatest _sang froid_, and with a suspicion of gratified mischief, in the line she adopted—including as she did the culprits among the recipients of the announcement—that she did not mean to give Oliver and Fan Constable up, neither did she mean them to give her up, since there were two at making a bargain and picking a quarrel.

It is putting it mildly to say that Fan did not like Louisa Hilliard and objected to being taken up by her, either on the score of remote relationship or anything else; but the girl could not bring herself, even with her strong dislikes, to reject the last refuge against finding herself reduced solely to the society of the Dadds and the Polleys.

Oliver rather enjoyed the broad tolerance of Mrs. Hilliard’s self-indulgent _bonhomie_, and he had a hankering still after having the entrance to the Meadows, though he availed himself of it to his own hurt, smarting as he did under the total absence of sympathy there, even more so than at home, from another Hilliard than Louisa.

Between Fan’s passiveness and Oliver’s treacherous inclinations, the exception to the social ban was admitted, and Mrs. Hilliard carried her point triumphantly as usual.

The tradespeople of Friarton could not be said to welcome with open arms Oliver Constable’s return to their shops and back parlours. His old acquaintances had liked him better than they had liked Fan, though he had been of Fan’s mind once on a day, and had looked down from the giddy heights of juvenile scholarship on the dull fat plains of trade, vowing superciliously that he should never rest in them. But, oddly enough, in proportion as Oliver became a man and changed his mind, his early friends learnt to distrust him more and more. True, Oliver’s recantation was received with shouts from young Dadd, chuckles from old Dadd, and giggles from the Polley girls, as at a conquest won by their class over that which pretended to be the superior rank. But Oliver’s outward adherence did not flatter his fellows out of their rooted conviction that he was not one of them, and might prove no better than a traitor in the camp. He was ‘a chield’ preparing to come among them, and take notes—not for the purpose of printing the notes, which would have been disloyal enough—but, what was far worse, with the intention of gauging the moral and intellectual condition of the shop people, and with the conceited aspiration of elevating it. And they had a strong objection to being thus elevated by a wolf in sheep’s clothing—old Peter Constable’s son spoilt by his own college education. He was giving himself out as intending to carry on his father’s trade, which he was safe to make a mess of, while he was nourishing deep designs under the cloak of the mill and the baker’s shop. He to be a miller and baker! Old Dadd had heard Oliver could read Greek like a parson, but he could no more throw off a covering of pie crust than he could fly. Why, it was only the other day he was walking up the High Street with his arm linked in Fremantle’s! Fremantle might be as poor as a church-mouse and only a better sort of school usher, but he could read the lessons in his white surplice on Sundays the same as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dadd went in for chapel, not church, still even his minister owned that Fremantle was a cut above him in this world. And there was Mrs. Fremantle in her shabby gown—that woman only acknowledged the existence of such a female as Mrs. Dadd in the shop. No doubt Mrs. Fremantle was as gracious as could be over the counter, which was no less than her bounden duty, seeing the length of time her bills stood in his books, still, in the middle of her graciousness, she managed to convey the impression that his—Dadd’s—better half was of a different order of creation from that which had the honour of claiming Mrs. Fremantle as its product. Well, old Dadd, for his part, did not object. He was aware that the Fremantles, for all their poverty and shabbiness, dined at the squire’s table when he was at home, while Dadd and Mrs. Dadd got no farther than the housekeeper’s room; and neither did he wish to change places with the schoolmaster and his lady in this respect. But let fish be fish, and fowl fowl—not ‘’alf and ’alf,’ as Oliver Constable would have them.

Mrs. Hilliard was not wrong when she judged from her own feelings the general disagreeableness of being dragged up to breathe a higher and purer atmosphere.

At the same time, as may have been seen, the shop people, with their plain common sense and shrewd wits—sharpened by jealousy, alarm, and latent sluggish hostility—arrived more quickly and surely at Oliver’s eccentric, high-flying views than the more cultivated portion of the community puzzling over his meaning.

Oliver Constable laid himself out to gain old Dadd and induce his senior to look upon him as a man and a brother. Oliver had patience with the draper’s ways, including the loud stale jokes he poked at Oliver as to his getting a wife and Fan’s finding a husband. According to Dadd’s ideas, courtship in some form was the one engrossing concern of all young people—after the attention which the young man was bound to pay to his trade and the pleasure the girl might take in her smart clothes and her outings, which, to be sure, were adjuncts to the main business of her life. Indeed Dadd looked charitably to a suitable marriage for Oliver Constable as the most likely cure for the lad’s folly. Certainly young Dadd, who was several years Oliver’s senior, remained a bachelor. But his father explained the contradiction by rubbing his hands and accusing Jack of being ‘a sad dog’ among the ladies.

Jack blustered out, ‘What nonsense, guv’ner! Anyone might tell I had not much to say to the girls by the looks of me,’ clearly regarding the charge as made out and as a feather in his cap. Even his mother, in her sleek demureness, seemed to agree with him.

Oliver manfully stood the ‘heavy teas’ under which the Dadds’ table groaned. He ate gallantly the fat bacon and pickled salmon in order that his entertainers, like John Gilpin’s neighbours, might not say he was proud. He did not faint at the sight, or smell, of the raw onions, to which the whole Dadd family were partial. He did not throw down his arms and fly when gin-and-water succeeded tea, and added its contribution to the already salient odours of the back parlour. Luckily, Oliver had a good digestion and a robust constitution; and though the details had not to him the fascination of novelty which they might have possessed for Harry Stanhope, neither were they the exaggerated offences which they had proved to Fan in her craving for outward refinement. It goes without saying that Oliver was free from the affected, effeminate horror of the small pretender to gentility, the snob who, having just cast his native coarse slough, has wriggled himself into a new coat of superfine delicacy and fastidiousness. Oliver rather respected the Dadds for not altering their ordinary style of hospitality out of compliment to what they might imagine his changed habits and tastes.

The Dadds’ independence saved Oliver the trouble—which worried him at the Polleys, of having perpetually to rebut the attacks which Mrs. Polley with her high spirit made on his supposed conversion to fine living. Mrs. Polley would not—any more than old Dadd—deign to accommodate herself to Oliver Constable’s presumed new standard, but she would persist in bringing it up in the form of testy apologies for the deprivations he had to suffer. ‘Of course, our teas ain’t like the meals you’ve been accustomed to, Mr. Oliver,’ she always began, exasperatingly. ‘French cooks and a dozen courses, I dare say, no less will serve you now—I am sure I pity your sister—and your choice of wines every day. All I can say for our poached eggs and fried mackerel is they are new laid and I know the hens as laid them, while the fish is fresh and done to a turn, though I say it that should not. They are honest English dishes honestly come by and paid for.’

Then the girls would giggle and protest. ‘Oh! mother!’ in chorus. And ’Mily, the youngest and most forward of the sisters, would toss her elaborately dressed head and cry, ‘I hope you are not hard to please, Mr. Oliver; I should never put myself about to cosset any man. There!’

At last the poor creature the father, whose wife had stood in the breach, and prevented him from dragging down the family to ruin, would edge in his word and declare solemnly—not without a timid attempt at pleasing his mistress, who was not great enough to forget what she had done for him—‘Missus Polley never did go in for kickshaws or waste; she always was a one to prefer what was plain and satisfying.’

In return for the tribute cast at her feet, Mrs. Polley would look round with complacent contempt, and charge her husband: ‘You shut up, Polley, and eat your victuals; you know you have a trick of keeping the table waiting. I am glad none of the gals take after you, unless it be Liza—soft thing! Slow at meat is slow at work. You may be thankful I never were a dawdler, and that I went in—the greater fool I—for looking after you.’

Whereupon poor Mr. Polley would subside into silence and the munching of his food as fast as his few teeth would go.

And the girls would titter afresh and cry again, ‘Oh! mother!’ in another round of family applause. Only Liza would protest against the accusation of procrastination—particularly where her favourite ‘beverage’ was in question. They all knew, Liza said—almost as solemnly and pompously as her father spoke—that she could sip tea morning, noon, and night. There was no substitute for it—unless lemonade.

‘Or beer—especially when Jack Dadd is having a glass,’ suggested ’Mily, flippantly.

The result of the impertinence was that the two sisters began to dispute together with painful frankness and vigour as to which of them paid least heed to Jack Dadd and his actions, till Mrs. Polley, who took and kept the high constable tone in her family, called the noisy pair to order, as it were, with a wave of her truncheon, and an imperious, ‘Be quiet, gals! Don’t be two sillies putting up your backs before Mr. Oliver.’

But although Dadd the draper was brought to discuss with Oliver, in the character of a fellow-tradesman, the general principles of sales, profits, ready money discount, long credit, bad debts, the danger of the co-operative system, apprentices, journeymen, hours of closing and holidays, the cautious veteran would no more approach, in the course of conversation, his individual practice in such debatable doings as a percentage to the seller on each day’s sales, or with regard to so-called ‘bankrupt stocks,’ ‘damaged goods,’ ‘clearing-off sales,’ ‘ready-made work done on the premises,’ than he would have spoken of these trade mysteries to the vicar, Mr. Houghton, or Dadd’s own minister, Mr. Holland.

Moreover, old Dadd would say ‘sir’ in addressing his young fellow-townsman. Mrs. Dadd was quite as mannerly, with a certain folding of the hands and falsetto tone of voice which took the place of the twinkle in her husband’s eye and his sturdy accents, in their common politeness; and so long as that small term of half-ironical respect came in with every alternate sentence from the two, Oliver had scanty hope of gaining ground with them.

Jack Dadd was not unwilling to be seen walking along the High Street with Constable of Friarton Mill, late of St. Bodolph’s, Oxford University, or standing with him at their respective shop-doors. Jack went farther: he slapped his old school-fellow and brother-tradesman on the shoulder at parting with a resounding slap, which Oliver bore unflinchingly, though he did not return it. The young draper addressed the miller and baker as ‘Noll,’ in the hearing of the Polley girls, and Oliver answered cheerfully the free abbreviation of his Christian name; yet, though Oliver was anxiously wary in his intercourse with Jack, and scrupulously avoided the most distant reference to printed matter which was not in the ‘Friarton News,’ all the same, Jack had continually present to him his own literary deficiencies, especially in the rudimentary branches of grammar and spelling. What was lacking in the last might have escaped detection for the present, but the culprit had a guilty conviction that Constable would somehow guess that he—Jack—was never sure in writing a letter when he ought or ought not to double his consonants, or to introduce an _e_ after a _b_ or an _l_ or a _t_. And Jack had an inward uncomfortable impression that a college swell must look down upon him for such a weakness; even though Constable might be a big enough swell, or a sufficiently artful dodger, not to brandish his superior advantages in Jack’s face.

It is by no means pleasant to be haunted by a sense of inferiority even in so small a matter. And Jack Dadd was not accustomed to submit to such an experience.

Till Oliver came home, Jack had swaggered and crowed a good deal over the young men of his class in Friarton and the neighbourhood.

Old Dadd was well-to-do, and Jack was an only child. Of course he was not like an ordinary young man in the drapery line to which he had been bred. He was the young master and successor to a good business.

But now Jack Dadd began to fear that Oliver Constable—queer fish and out of the water as he was—would cut Jack out with some of his most ardent admirers. In taking up his father’s trade Oliver had still retained his reputation for wonderful cleverness and learning, above all for that swell’s tone of consideration, tolerance, and gentleness which qualified Constable’s bluntest ways, and of which none had a keener perception than poor Jack, who lacked it utterly. Girls were so foolish and vain, always caught by novelty and gentility. No doubt Oliver Constable was not a gentleman born, any more than the rest of them could boast of being lords’ and squires’ sons. What was more, he had farther diminished his claims to being a gentleman by choosing to work—at least to have a mill and a bakehouse and shop, instead of to live idle and take his pleasure out of the fortune old Constable had left, as Jack felt certain he would have done in Oliver’s place.

Still, when all was said, Constable was the nearest thing to a gentleman that would cross the path of girls in Jack’s circle, and Jack reflected the girls would make the most of Oliver, and he would become the rage.

That goose Liza Polley, who pretended to read collections of poetry, would be making a hero of Constable, and that minx ’Mily would be treating the fellow to some of her sauce.

Jack, on his part and speaking impartially, was disappointed in Constable’s abilities and attainments. It was all very well to admit that Oliver Constable had got a fine education and had not become an insolent shaver on the strength of it. Hang him! he was too near the real Mackay for that. But actually he did not know anything worth caring about. He could not put Jack up to a single wrinkle on any point he was interested in, with regard to which Constable had been in a position to have become a valuable authority if he were not a noodle in some respects.

Jack had sought to balance the effeminate nature of his daily occupations in matching skeins of silk and turning over gloves, by an excess of manliness in his recreations. He went in strongly for games and sport. He could not often get away to attend a morning or an afternoon cricket match, for his father had old-fashioned strict notions of what was due to business and business hours. Therefore Jack’s pink and white complexion lost the chance of being tanned brown. But he played cricket and bowls with a club of Friarton shopkeepers every fine evening all the summer. He took in ‘Bell’s Life;’ he kept a bull-terrier, and sometimes managed to engage it in a ratting match. And he betted as regularly on the Derby and the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race as if he had driven more than once in his life to Epsom Downs, wearing a green veil and scattering flour on the way, or as if he had a hereditary association with either University.

Jack found Oliver Constable, for all his so-called attainments, lamentably behind him in the important matters referred to. Oliver could play cricket decently indeed, but he could do so when he was a boy. And it was only by dragging what information there was to get, word by word, out of him, that a Friarton cricketer could ascertain how the nobs at the University played their game. Constable did not read a sporting paper. He had not been in the habit of betting, though he did not preach a sermon against the practice, possibly he meant his silent example to serve as a text. Altogether, and this was a consolation, if he said as little to the girls about the college spreads and blow-outs, he might not take the wind out of Jack’s sails to the extent he had apprehended. But the deficiency certainly rendered Oliver less of an acquisition to his old acquaintances.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

Transcriber Notes

Hyphens standardised across text.
The following are corrections to the original text.
p11 close quote removed from (pleasure to look at.)
p36 “distinugish” changed to (distinguish third- or).
p69 close quote added to (at your heels.’)
p81 close quote added to (scholar and gentleman.’)
p97 “downfal” changed to (downfall of all the).
p98 period changed to comma (familiar mill gallery,)
p111 period added to (‘Oh, Oliver, think again.’)
p112 close quote added to (are going to do,’)
p181 single changed to double quote (“he is my servant)