The Dadds by now had gone down, alas, in the world; however, St. Eldred’s never dreamed of making worldly prosperity a criterion for approval. St. Eldred’s lived, itself, in a penurious prosperity or a prosperous poverty; wealth, being unattainable, was held to be undesirable as well as rather vulgar, and the fading income of the Dadds only set the seal on their title to general admiration. The farm was still theirs indeed, but its yield was less and lessening. All through the good old Protection days their corn had brought high prices; but, unfortunately, the cost of living had grown even higher in proportion, until the Dadds found themselves forced to renounce agricultural hopes, leave the farm fallow, and plunge into small trade. From this they made a fair livelihood, and were able to support their regal position in the world of St. Eldred’s. So they lived, married, ruled, and died, till never a house in St. Eldred’s but was kin to the royal family of Dadd. James Dadd after James Dadd contentedly took up his sceptre, swayed it during his time, and laid it by. Their clan, like all others in St. Eldred’s, was magnificently complacent in contemplation of its own position. No Dadd was ever heard to aspire to more giddy worlds, no Dadd was ever known to show any hankerings after wilder flights, after new courses, after original thought or action of any kind. In a young member of the family, in a collateral, the weight of his elders would immediately have crushed out such sparks of discontent; as for the head of the dynasty, so surrounded was the ruling Dadd by now with uncles, cousins, and aunts, not to mention dowagers of bygone sovereigns, that it would have been as easy for him to revolt as for a Pope to make headway against the College of Cardinals. Such, then, was the decorous state of affairs, when suddenly a most astonishing thing happened. The railway mania was sweeping over England. Counties were being opened up, and landowners being driven crazy with hysterical apprehensions of ruin, and opposition to every threatened change. At first all these commotions left the quiet waters of St. Eldred’s unruffled. But eventually a railway company came sniffing round the ancestral but profitless farm of the Dadds, and, somehow, during the negotiations, it was discovered that those barren acres covered a coal-field of exuberant richness.