Nothing was done to encourage
strangers; I shouldn't wonder if Mrs. Combermere didn't pay old Jolliffe
of "The Bull" so much a year to keep his hotel inconvenient and
insanitary. The men on the Town Council were for the most part like the
Canons, aged and conservative. It is true that it was in 1897 that
Barnstaple was elected Mayor, but without Ronder I doubt whether even he
would have been able to do very much.
The town then revolved, so to speak, entirely on its own axis; it revolved
between the two great events of the year, the summer Polchester Fair, the
winter County Ball, and those two great affairs were conducted, in every
detail and particular, as they had been conducted a hundred years before.
I find it strange, writing from the angle of to-day, to conceive it
possible that so short a time ago anything in England could have been so
conservative. I myself was only thirteen years of age when Ronder came to
our town, and saw all grown figures with the exaggerated colour and
romance that local inquisitive age bestows. About my own contemporaries,
young Jeremy Cole for instance, there was no colour at all, but the older
figures were strange--gigantic, almost mythological.
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