is cab, and caught the next train to South Mord
en.
South Morden was then (and remains to this day) one of those primitive
agricultural villages, passed over by the march of modern progress,
which are still to be found in the near neighborhood of London. Only the
slow trains stopped at the station and there was so little to do that
the station-master and his porter grew flowers on the embankment, and
trained creepers over the waiting-room window. Turning your back on the
railway, and walking along the one street of South Morden, you found
yourself in the old England of two centuries since. Gabled cottages,
with fast-closed windows; pigs and poultry in quiet possession of the
road; the venerable church surrounded by its shady burial-ground; the
grocer's shop which sold everything, and the butcher's shop which sold
nothing; the scarce inhabitants who liked a good look at a stranger, and
the unwashed children who were pictures of dirty health; the clash of
the iron-chained bucket in the public well, and the thump of the falling
nine-pins in the skittle-ground behind the public-house; the horse-pond
on the one bit of open ground, and the old elm-tree with the wooden seat
round it on the other--these were some of the objects that you saw, and
some of the noises that you heard in South Morden, as you passed from
one end of the village to the other.
About half a mile beyond the last of the old cottages, modern England
met you again under the form of a row of little villas, set up by an
adventurous London builder who had bought the land a bargain. Each villa
stood in its own little garden, and looked across a stony road at the
meadow lands and softly-rising wooded hills beyond. Each villa faced you
in the sunshine with the horrid glare of new red brick, and forced its
nonsensical name on your attention, traced in bright paint on the posts
of its entrance gate. Consulting the posts as he advanced, Mr. Troy
arrived in due course of time at the villa called The Lawn, which
derived its name apparently from a circular patch of grass in front of
the house. The gate resisting his efforts to open it, he rang the bell.
Admitted by a trim, clean, shy little maid-servant, Mr. Troy looked
about him in amazement. Turn which way he might, he found himself
silently confronted by posted and painted instructions to visitors,
which forbade him to do this, and commanded him to do that, at every
step of his progress from the gate to the house
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