ed, and set
on the table with much daintiness. The bread was particularly good, and
was of several different kinds, from the big, rather close,
dark-coloured, sweet-tasting farmhouse loaf, which was most to my liking,
to the thin pipe-stems of wheaten crust, such as I have eaten in Turin.

As I was putting the first mouthfuls into my mouth my eye caught a carved
and gilded inscription on the panelling, behind what we should have
called the High Table in an Oxford college hall, and a familiar name in
it forced me to read it through. Thus it ran:

"_Guests and neighbours_, _on the site of this Guest-hall once stood
the lecture-room of the Hammersmith Socialists_. _Drink a glass to
the memory_! _May 1962_."

It is difficult to tell you how I felt as I read these words, and I
suppose my face showed how much I was moved, for both my friends looked
curiously at me, and there was silence between us for a little while.

Presently the weaver, who was scarcely so well mannered a man as the
ferryman, said to me rather awkwardly:

"Guest, we don't know what to call you: is there any indiscretion in
asking you your name?"

"Well," said I, "I have some doubts about it myself; so suppose you call
me Guest, which is a family name, you know, and add William to it if you
please."

Dick nodded kindly to me; but a shade of anxiousness passed over the
weaver's face, and he said--"I hope you don't mind my asking, but would
you tell me where you come from? I am curious about such things for good
reasons, literary reasons."

Dick was clearly kicking him underneath the table; but he was not much
abashed, and awaited my answer somewhat eagerly. As for me, I was just
going to blurt out "Hammersmith," when I bethought me what an
entanglement of cross purposes that would lead us into; so I took time to
invent a lie with circumstance, guarded by a little truth, and said:

"You see, I have been such a long time away from Europe that things seem
strange to me now; but I was born and bred on the edge of Epping Forest;
Walthamstow and Woodford, to wit."

"A pretty place, too," broke in Dick; "a very jolly place, now that the
trees have had time to grow again since the great clearing of houses in
1955."

Quoth the irrepressible weaver: "Dear neighbour, since you knew the
Forest some time ago, could you tell me what truth there is in the rumour
that in the nineteenth century the trees were all pollards?"

This was catching me