nder
notice to quit, the last patch of country in a district flooded by new
and (other) things. He did his best to console himself, to imagine
matters near the turn of the tide.

"You'd hardly think it could keep on," he said.

Mr. Smallways' aged father, could remember Bun Hill as an idyllic
Kentish village. He had driven Sir Peter Bone until he was fifty and
then he took to drink a little, and driving the station bus, which
lasted him until he was seventy-eight. Then he retired. He sat by the
fireside, a shrivelled, very, very old coachman, full charged with
reminiscences, and ready for any careless stranger. He could tell you of
the vanished estate of Sir Peter Bone, long since cut up for building,
and how that magnate ruled the country-side when it was country-side, of
shooting and hunting, and of caches along the high road, of how "where
the gas-works is" was a cricket-field, and of the coming of the Crystal
Palace. The Crystal Palace was six miles away from Bun Hill, a great
facade that glittered in the morning, and was a clear blue outline
against the sky in the afternoon, and of a night, a source of gratuitous
fireworks for all the population of Bun Hill. And then had come the
railway, and then villas and villas, and then the gas-works and the
water-works, and a great, ugly sea of workmen's houses, and then
drainage, and the water vanished out of the Otterbourne and left it a
dreadful ditch, and then a second railway station, Bun Hill South, and
more houses and more, more shops, more competition, plate-glass shops,
a school-board, rates, omnibuses, tramcars--going right away into
London itself--bicycles, motor-cars and then more motor-cars, a Carnegie
library.

"You'd hardly think it could keep on," said Mr. Tom Smallways, growing
up among these marvels.

But it kept on. Even from the first the green-grocer's shop which he had
set up in one of the smallest of the old surviving village houses in
the tail of the High Street had a submerged air, an air of hiding from
something that was looking for it. When they had made up the pavement of
the High Street, they levelled that up so that one had to go down three
steps into the shop. Tom did his best to sell only his own excellent
but limited range of produce; but Progress came shoving things into his
window, French artichokes and aubergines, foreign apples--apples from
the State of New York, apples from California, apples from Canada,
apples from New Zealand, "pr