as particularly
distinguished on these occasions because he wore a top hat with gold
lace about it and a green coat and trousers that he had found upon a
skeleton in the basement of the Urban and District Bank. The women, even
Jessica, came in jackets and immense hats extravagantly trimmed with
artificial flowers and exotic birds' feather's--of which there were
abundant supplies in the shops to the north--and the children (there
were not many children, because a large proportion of the babies born in
Bun Hill died in a few days' time of inexplicable maladies) had similar
clothes cut down to accommodate them; even Stringer's little grandson of
four wore a large top hat.

That was the Sunday costume of the Bun Hill district, a curious and
interesting survival of the genteel traditions of the Scientific Age. On
a weekday the folk were dingily and curiously hung about with dirty rags
of housecloth and scarlet flannel, sacking, curtain serge, and patches
of old carpet, and went either bare-footed or on rude wooden sandals.
These people, the reader must understand, were an urban population
sunken back to the state of a barbaric peasantry, and so without any of
the simple arts a barbaric peasantry would possess. In many ways they
were curiously degenerate and incompetent. They had lost any idea
of making textiles, they could hardly make up clothes when they had
material, and they were forced to plunder the continually dwindling
supplies of the ruins about them for cover.

All the simple arts they had ever known they had lost, and with the
breakdown of modern drainage, modern water supply, shopping, and the
like, their civilised methods were useless. Their cooking was worse than
primitive. It was a feeble muddling with food over wood fires in rusty
drawing-room fireplaces; for the kitcheners burnt too much. Among them
all no sense of baking or brewing or metal-working was to be found.

Their employment of sacking and such-like coarse material for work-a-day
clothing, and their habit of tying it on with string and of thrusting
wadding and straw inside it for warmth, gave these people an odd,
"packed" appearance, and as it was a week-day when Tom took his little
nephew for the hen-seeking excursion, so it was they were attired.

"So you've really got to Bun Hill at last, Teddy," said old Tom,
beginning to talk and slackening his pace so soon as they were out of
range of old Jessica. "You're the last of Bert's boys for me to se