hances of a German raid, before
the Channel Fleet got round to us. I slept at a small public-house
in a Shaphambury back street on Sunday night. I did not get on to
Shaphambury from Wyvern until two in the afternoon, because of the
infrequency of Sunday trains, and I got no clue whatever until late
in the afternoon of Monday. As the little local train bumped into
sight of the place round the curve of a swelling hill, one saw
a series of undulating grassy spaces, amidst which a number of
conspicuous notice-boards appealed to the eye and cut up the distant
sea horizon. Most of these referred to comestibles or to remedies
to follow the comestibles; and they were colored with a view to be
memorable rather than beautiful, to "stand out" amidst the gentle
grayish tones of the east coast scenery. The greater number, I may
remark, of the advertisements that were so conspicuous a factor
in the life of those days, and which rendered our vast tree-pulp
newspapers possible, referred to foods, drinks, tobacco, and the
drugs that promised a restoration of the equanimity these other
articles had destroyed. Wherever one went one was reminded in glaring
letters that, after all, man was little better than a worm, that
eyeless, earless thing that burrows and lives uncomplainingly
amidst nutritious dirt, "an alimentary canal with the subservient
appendages thereto." But in addition to such boards there were also
the big black and white boards of various grandiloquently named
"estates." The individualistic enterprise of that time had led to
the plotting out of nearly all the country round the seaside towns
into roads and building-plots--all but a small portion of the south
and east coast was in this condition, and had the promises of those
schemes been realized the entire population of the island might
have been accommodated upon the sea frontiers. Nothing of the sort
happened, of course; the whole of this uglification of the coast-line
was done to stimulate a little foolish gambling in plots, and
one saw everywhere agents' boards in every state of freshness and
decay, ill-made exploitation roads overgrown with grass, and here
and there, at a corner, a label, "Trafalgar Avenue," or "Sea View
Road." Here and there, too, some small investor, some shopman with
"savings," had delivered his soul to the local builders and built
himself a house, and there it stood, ill-designed, mean-looking,
isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced plot, athwart