The Thornliebank folk as I knew them, and as I was one of them, are reproduced in “Bunty” with a fidelity that shows how dramatic the commonplace can be. Thornliebank was and is a village almost entirely of one industry. The Crum Print Works employed several hundred people. The Crums were among the first manufacturers to recognize that they owed to their employes more than the smallest wages that they would consent to work for. The influence of Robert Owen, the socialistic employer of New Lanark, had spread to our locality. The Crums furnished certain institutional services for the village. They were circumscribed enough, in comparison with what has been done by the Cadburys at Bournville and the Levers at Port Sunlight, but were considerable advances on the average standard of industrial amenities in the mid-nineteenth century. They were the heralds and examples which, in due time, produced the Bournvilles and Port Sunlights, the Garden Cities and the town planners. Roundabout, Thornliebank was known as the model village, because of the Crums’ commonsense philanthropies. There was a commodious village club, the facilities of which, and especially the library, were greater than the membership fees. Sport was not the feature of country life that it has since become everywhere--perhaps because that was still the era when Shanks’s pony was the steed on which people put their odds. It was also the era of mutual improvement expressed in musical and literary endeavour. In the Literary Society my sphere was humble enough, though I recall the labour with which I set forth the fruit of researches on such subjects as the history of railways. The Thornliebank Choral Union was nothing extraordinary, of course, except perhaps that its daring members constituted me their treasurer, and managed to renew their courage when the annual meeting recurred. But Thornliebank’s chief musical fame was derived from its brass band, into the glories of which I was never initiated. It had (speaking from memory) twenty-four pieces; and was in much demand for excursions and celebrations over a pretty wide territory. The pay for a long day’s activity wouldn’t be more than twenty-five or thirty dollars--think of that, ye who inhibit musicians from playing with a Pageant Chorus, because of a union punctilio. A long day’s activity? Many a Saturday morning have I been wakened at five o’clock by the band playing itself through the village on the way to Glasgow, there, at seven, to lead its employing multitude to a boat for a journey down the Clyde. The band walked the five miles to Glasgow, and played most of the way. Practice in daylight maybe saved the cost of candle-light.