ink itself one. The population of some five hundred twenty years ago
has increased to over two thousand; the final shabby patches of the old
heath are disappearing; on all hands glimpses of new building and raw
new roads defy you to persuade yourself that you are in a country place.
In fact, the place is a suburb of the town in the next valley, and the
once quiet high-road is noisy with the motor-cars of the richer
residents and all the town traffic that waits upon the less wealthy.

But although in the exactest sense the parish was never a village, its
inhabitants, as lately as twenty years ago (when I came to live here)
had after all a great many of the old English country characteristics.
Dependent on the town for their living the most of them may have been by
that time; yet they had derived their outlook and their habits from the
earlier half-squatting, half-yeoman people; so that I found myself
amongst neighbours rustic enough to justify me in speaking of them as
villagers. I have come across their like elsewhere, and I am not
deceived. They had the country touch. They were a survival of the
England that is dying out now; and I grieve that I did not realize it
sooner. As it was, some years had passed by, and the movement by which I
find myself living to-day in a "residential centre" was already faintly
stirring before I began to discern properly that the earlier
circumstances would repay closer attention.

They were not all agreeable circumstances; some of them, indeed, were so
much the reverse of agreeable that I hardly see now how I could ever
have found them even tolerable. The want of proper sanitation, for
instance; the ever-recurring scarcity of water; the plentiful signs of
squalid and disordered living--how unpleasant they all must have been!
On the other hand, some of the circumstances were so acceptable that, to
recover them, I could at times almost be willing to go back and endure
the others. It were worth something to renew the old lost sense of
quiet; worth something to be on such genial terms with one's neighbours;
worth very much to become acquainted again at first hand with the
customs and modes of thought that prevailed in those days. Here at my
door people were living, in many respects, by primitive codes which have
now all but disappeared from England, and things must have been
frequently happening such as, henceforth, will necessitate journeys into
other countries if one would see them.

I