I should like to have seen with my eyes
what success the new order of things had had in getting rid of the
sprawling mess with which commercialism had littered the banks of the
wide stream about Reading and Caversham: certainly everything smelt too
deliciously in the early night for there to be any of the old careless
sordidness of so-called manufacture; and in answer to my question as to
what sort of a place Reading was, Dick answered:

"O, a nice town enough in its way; mostly rebuilt within the last hundred
years; and there are a good many houses, as you can see by the lights
just down under the hills yonder. In fact, it is one of the most
populous places on the Thames round about here. Keep up your spirits,
guest! we are close to our journey's end for the night. I ought to ask
your pardon for not stopping at one of the houses here or higher up; but
a friend, who is living in a very pleasant house in the Maple-Durham
meads, particularly wanted me and Clara to come and see him on our way up
the Thames; and I thought you wouldn't mind this bit of night
travelling."

He need not have adjured me to keep up my spirits, which were as high as
possible; though the strangeness and excitement of the happy and quiet
life which I saw everywhere around me was, it is true, a little wearing
off, yet a deep content, as different as possible from languid
acquiescence, was taking its place, and I was, as it were, really new-
born.

We landed presently just where I remembered the river making an elbow to
the north towards the ancient house of the Blunts; with the wide meadows
spreading on the right-hand side, and on the left the long line of
beautiful old trees overhanging the water. As we got out of the boat, I
said to Dick--

"Is it the old house we are going to?"

"No," he said, "though that is standing still in green old age, and is
well inhabited. I see, by the way, that you know your Thames well. But
my friend Walter Allen, who asked me to stop here, lives in a house, not
very big, which has been built here lately, because these meadows are so
much liked, especially in summer, that there was getting to be rather too
much of tenting on the open field; so the parishes here about, who rather
objected to that, built three houses between this and Caversham, and
quite a large one at Basildon, a little higher up. Look, yonder are the
lights of Walter Allen's house!"

So we walked over the grass of the meadows under a flood