y four
succumbed to the necessary hardships of their simple life. They lived
and did well, as well was understood in those days. They went the way of
all flesh, year by year.

THE EPILOGUE

It happened that one bright summer's morning exactly thirty years after
the launching of the first German air-fleet, an old man took a small boy
to look for a missing hen through the ruins of Bun Hill and out towards
the splintered pinnacles of the Crystal Palace. He was not a very
old man; he was, as a matter of fact, still within a few weeks of
sixty-three, but constant stooping over spades and forks and the
carrying of roots and manure, and exposure to the damps of life in the
open-air without a change of clothing, had bent him into the form of a
sickle. Moreover, he had lost most of his teeth and that had affected
his digestion and through that his skin and temper. In face and
expression he was curiously like that old Thomas Smallways who had once
been coachman to Sir Peter Bone, and this was just as it should be,
for he was Tom Smallways the son, who formerly kept the little
green-grocer's shop under the straddle of the mono-rail viaduct in the
High Street of Bun Hill. But now there were no green-grocer's shops,
and Tom was living in one of the derelict villas hard by that unoccupied
building site that had been and was still the scene of his daily
horticulture. He and his wife lived upstairs, and in the drawing and
dining rooms, which had each French windows opening on the lawn, and all
about the ground floor generally, Jessica, who was now a lean and lined
and baldish but still very efficient and energetic old woman, kept
her three cows and a multitude of gawky hens. These two were part of a
little community of stragglers and returned fugitives, perhaps a hundred
and fifty souls of them all together, that had settled down to the new
conditions of things after the Panic and Famine and Pestilence that
followed in the wake of the War. They had come back from strange refuges
and hiding-places and had squatted down among the familiar houses and
begun that hard struggle against nature for food which was now the chief
interest of their lives. They were by sheer preoccupation with that a
peaceful people, more particularly after Wilkes, the house agent, driven
by some obsolete dream of acquisition, had been drowned in the pool by
the ruined gas-works for making inquiries into title and displaying a
litigious turn of mind. (He ha