offended by the wondrous creations of the estate agents and local
builders, who have no other ambition but to build cheaply. The
contrast between the new and the old is indeed deplorable. The old
cottage is a thing of beauty. Its odd, irregular form and various
harmonious colouring, the effects of weather, time, and accident,
environed with smiling verdure and sweet old-fashioned garden flowers,
its thatched roof, high gabled front, inviting porch overgrown with
creepers, and casement windows, all combine to form a fair and
beautiful home. And then look at the modern cottage with its glaring
brick walls, slate roof, ungainly stunted chimney, and note the
difference. Usually these modern cottages are built in a row, each one
exactly like its fellow, with door and window frames exactly alike,
brought over ready-made from Norway or Sweden. The walls are thin, and
the winds of winter blow through them piteously, and if a man and his
wife should unfortunately "have words" (the pleasing country euphemism
for a violent quarrel) all their neighbours can hear them. The scenery
is utterly spoilt by these ugly eyesores. Villas at Hindhead seem to
have broken out upon the once majestic hill like a red skin eruption.
The jerry-built villa is invading our heaths and pine-woods; every
street in our towns is undergoing improvement; we are covering whole
counties with houses. In Lancashire no sooner does one village end its
mean streets than another begins. London is ever enlarging itself,
extending its great maw over all the country round. The Rev. Canon
Erskine Clarke, Vicar of Battersea, when he first came to reside near
Clapham Junction, remembers the green fields and quiet lanes with
trees on each side that are now built over. The street leading from
the station lined with shops forty years ago had hedges and trees on
each side. There were great houses situated in beautiful gardens and
parks wherein resided some of the great City merchants, county
families, the leaders in old days of the influential "Clapham sect."
These gardens and parks have been covered with streets and rows of
cottages and villas; some of the great houses have been pulled down
and others turned into schools or hospitals, valued only at the rent
of the land on which they stand. All this is inevitable. You cannot
stop all this any more than Mrs. Partington could stem the Atlantic
tide with a housemaid's mop. But ere the flood has quite swallowed up
all that remai