No; the Chamber of Commerce had not protested.  And yet it occurred to me more than once during the next few days that strangers attracted to Troy by its reputation as a health resort must have marvelled as they walked our streets, where cases of sunstroke, frost-bite, snake-bite, and incipient croup challenged their pity at every corner.  The very babies took their first steps in splints, and when they tumbled were examined by their older playmates, and pronounced to be suffering from apoplexy or alcoholic poisoning, as fancy happened to suggest.  I believe that a single instruction in the Association’s Handbook—­ carefully italicised there, I must admit—­alone saved our rising generation.  It ran:  “Unless perfectly sure that the patient is intoxicated, do not give the emetic.”

To be sure, we left these extravagances to the children.  But childhood, after all, is a relative term, and in Troy we pass through it to sober age by nice gradations; which take time.  Already a foreign sailor who had committed the double imprudence of drinking heavily at the Crown and Anchor, and falling asleep afterwards on the foreshore while waiting for his boat, was complaining vigorously, through his Vice-Consul, of the varieties of treatment practised upon his insensible body; and only the difficulty of tracing five Esmarch bandages in a town where five hundred had been sold in a fortnight averted a prosecution.  I was even prepared for a visit from Sir Felix Felix-Williams, our worthy Squire, who seldom misses an opportunity of turning our local enthusiasms to account, and sometimes does me the honour to enlist my help; but scarcely for the turn his suggestions took.

“You are, of course, interested in this movement?” he began.

“I have to be, seeing that I live in the midst of it.”

“You have joined the Ambulance Class, I hear.”

“Do you think I would neglect a precaution so obvious?  Until their enthusiasm abates, I certainly shall range myself among the First-Aiders rather than the Injured.”

“My idea was, to strike while the iron is hot.”

“Oh,” said I, “a town with so many in the fire—­”

“And I thought, perhaps, if we could manage to connect it in some way with the Primrose League—­”

“But what can it have to do with the Primrose League?” I asked stiffly.  I will admit now to a slight prejudice against the Ambulance business—­ due perhaps to the lecturer’s having chosen to start it in my absence.

Sir Felix was disappointed, and showed it.  “Why, it was you,” he reminded me, “who helped us last year by setting the widows to race for a leg of mutton.”

“I was a symbolist in those days.  And, excuse me, Sir Felix, it was not last year, but the year before.  Last year we had the surrender of Cronje at Paardeberg, with the widows dressed up as Boer women.”

“Is that so?  I thought we had Cronje two years ago, but no doubt you are right.  Now I thought that, with our Primrose fete coming on, and everybody just now taking such an interest in the Empire—­”