Now across the levels rise the distant houses of Bridgwater town, and the slim spire of its church. The long flat road, of undeviating directness, points directly towards the place. Hedgerow and other trees dispose themselves casually, without ordered plan, on either hand, and a railway crosses the highway, diagonally, on a bridge and embankment. The scene is absolutely negative and characterless: neither beautiful nor absolutely ugly: the very realisation, one would say, of the commonplace. As you proceed, a distant grouping of masts and spars proclaims the fact of navigable water being near at hand, and then groups of factory chimneys, smoking vigorously, loom up. These are the most outstanding marks of Bridgwater’s only prominent manufacture: the manufacture of “Bath bricks.” Every housewife knows what is meant by “Bath brick.” With this article of commerce and domestic economy knives are cleaned, brass fenders and candlesticks and coppers are scoured, and much other metal-work brought to brightness. But it is not made at Bath. At only one place in the world—and that Bridgwater—is the so-called “Bath brick” brought into being: the reason of this monopoly of manufacture lying in the fact that the material of which it is made is found only here in the mud of the river Parret. But only in a stretch of some three miles of that river’s course is found the peculiarly composed mud of which this aid to domestic cleanliness is compacted. Equally above and below the town, within those strictly-defined limits, the rise and fall of the tide amalgamates the river mud, and the seashore sand in just the right proportions for the scouring properties of “Bath brick.” At a further distance above the town, the mud that renders the Parret’s banks so unlovely becomes merely slime; while, as the sea is more nearly approached, the proportion of sharp sand in it destroys the binding character of the mud, and would render bricks made of the amalgam there found very destructive to cutlery and other ware unfortunate enough to be scoured by it. Why these “bricks,” made only at Bridgwater, should be given the name of “Bath,” and not that of the town where they originate, is a mystery at this lapse of time not likely to be solved. The most plausible explanation offered is that when these bricks were first made they were stored and “handled,” as a commercial man might say, at Bath.