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A Day at Tunbridge Wells
a change of acquaintances as well as a change of scene. It was easy, therefore, for a citizen at Bath or Tunbridge Wells to mix in good company; but he was a fool to be by this unduly elated, because it did not constitute a claim to be recognised elsewhere. " A maxim universally prevails among the English people, namely, to overlook and wholly neglect, on their return to the metropolis, all the connections they may have chanced to acquire during their residence at any of the medicinal wells," Smollett wrote in Ferdinand Count Fathom. " And this distinction is so scrupulously maintained, that two persons who lived in the most intimate correspondence at Bath and Tunbridge shall, in four-and-twenty hours, so totally forget their friendship as to meet in St. James's Park, without betraying the least token of recognition; so that one would imagine those mineral waters were so many streams issuing from the river Lethe." Sometimes the unwritten law was broken. There is a story told of a great nobleman who at " The Wells " became acquainted with a man of inferior station, a pleasant enough person whom he met frequently at the watering-places. Some time after this individual had
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