but short.

I hope my memory has not "berayed" me in making these little reminiscent
remarks. I did not make notes in my early days, and now in my later
years I may make little mistakes; but I do not think I have tripped very
much.

X.

THE CITY FRINGE.

It is my constant habit to take little runs into the outskirts of our
city, and when doing so I often stare with all my eyes as I note what
has taken place in a limited number of years. Districts hardly more than
a mile or so from the centre of the city, which in my boyhood were
fields and meadows, are now laid out into streets and covered with
houses and shops. Indeed, I sometimes feel very aged when I look upon
places where as a boy I went fishing for small fry, and now find the
river that afforded me such juvenile sport is, owing to the enhanced
value of laud, compressed into the dimensions of a fair-sized gutter,
with houses and small factories closely packed on its margin covering
every foot of ground.

I go in another direction, and scarcely farther than the distance just
named, and I come to a spot where once stood the fine large park (Aston)
which I remember was enclosed by a brick wall on every side. Scarcely a
trace of this extensive old wall can I now see, and the site of the old
park, or nearly the whole of it, is now covered with streets and
buildings. Aston Hall, the grand old Elizabethan house built by the
Holtes in the time of Charles I., still stands in a state of good
preservation, and is fortunately now the property of the city, together
with some forty acres of surrounding land, which is, as is well known,
used as a public recreation ground.

To speak a little more in detail, I am not the only person living who
remembers "Pudding Brook" and "Vaughton's Hole." The name of "Padding
Brook" was, in my boyish days, given to a swampy area of fields now
covered by Gooch Street and surrounding thoroughfares. Pudding Brook
proper was, however, a little muddy stream that flowed or oozed along
the district named and finally emptied itself into the old moat not far
from St. Martin's Church. Vaughton's Hole, to my juvenile mind, was
represented by a deep pool in the River Rea, where something direful
took place, in which a Mr. Vaughton was tragically concerned. The real
facts are--at least, so I read--that there was a clay pit, sixty feet
deep of water, situated near the Rea, and in this pit at least one man
was drowned. The place was named after