graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and
an ambitious area with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead
Cemetery Company, and planted with suitably high-minded and sorrowful
varieties of conifer. A stonemason took one of the earlier villas with
a front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a supply
of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone, marble, and
granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in elaborate detail the
entire population of Bromstead as one found it in 1750.

The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was in
the full tide of building and growth from the first; the second railway
with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage followed when I was
ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are of digging and wheeling,
of woods invaded by building, roads gashed open and littered with iron
pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of men peeped at and seen toiling
away deep down in excavations, of hedges broken down and replaced by
planks, of wheelbarrows and builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and
swallowed up by drain-pipes. Big trees, and especially elms, cleared
of undergrowth and left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar
tattered dinginess rather in the quality of needy widow women who have
seen happier days.

The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream. It came
into my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden, splashing
brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a mill. (Above the
weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing in splendid clumps,
and beyond that, pampas grass, yellow and crimson spikes of hollyhock,
and blue suggestions of wonderland.) From the pool at the foot of
this initial cascade it flowed in a leisurely fashion beside a
footpath,--there were two pretty thatched cottages on the left, and here
were ducks, and there were willows on the right,--and so came to where
great trees grew on high banks on either hand and bowed closer, and at
last met overhead. This part was difficult to reach because of an old
fence, but a little boy might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by
wading. Either I have actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has
described them so accurately to me that he inserted them into my
memory. I remember them there anyhow. Most of that overhung part I never
penetrated at all, but followed the field path with my mother and met
the stream again,