For the present, at any rate, the city showed no signs of perishing. During the last year or two, its tentacles had spread farther than ever before, swarming into the wet and lonely valley of the Dulas Fechan, a deep cleft in the mountains beyond Felindre where a noisy river ran through undergrowth older than man’s memory. From this valley, the council had decreed, the rain of the Savaddan watershed, which geology had destined for the Wye and later for the Atlantic, must now traverse eighty miles or more of conquered territory, and after being defouled by the domestic usages of North Bromwich, must find its way into the Trent, and so to the German Ocean, as the Romans thoughtlessly labelled the North Sea. “Water,” said the Mayor, who was also known as Sir Joseph Astill, the brewer, “water is one of the necessities of life. It is our duty to the public to see that they have it, and that they have it pure and unadulterated.” So the Welsh water came, and the altruistic baronet took the credit for it. Indeed the progressive spirit of North Bromwich found its incarnation in this fleshy gentleman. It was he who presented the municipal art gallery with their unrivalled collection of Madox-Jones cartoons, to say nothing of three portraits of himself exemplifying (he had an elegant vocabulary) the styles of the three greatest portrait painters of modern times. It was he who saved the art of music from degradation by fighting, with all the weight of his personal influence, against the performance of secular music, music, that is, divorced from “sacred” words, upon the Sabbath. It was he, again, who aroused public feeling on the question of the university: “the first Modern university,” he called it. He accomplished its endowment, equipped it with a principal whose name was a household word in the homes of the great middle classes; and finally set the seal of modernity on his creation, less than twenty years before the total prohibition of alcohol became law in retrograde America, by instituting a learned faculty and providing a degree in the science of . . . brewing. Just as an example of the city’s liberality, there was also a faculty of Arts. The faculty of Science, of course, was important, if only as an appendage to the brewing school; those of Engineering and Mining flattered the industries of the district; that of Commerce taught its graduates to write business letters in every spoken tongue and give the Yankees what for; and lastly, that of Medicine, supplied a necessary antidote to the activities of most of the others.