. But I don't think I quite follow you."

"Well, in plain language, we have no good writers in London who make a
specialty of that kind of thing. Our common reporter is a dull dog;
every story that he has to tell is spoilt in the telling. His idea of
horror and of what excites horror is so lamentably deficient. Nothing
will content the fellow but blood, vulgar red blood, and when he can
get it he lays it on thick, and considers that he has produced a
telling story. It's a poor notion. And, by some curious fatality, it is
the most commonplace and brutal murders which always attract the most
attention and get written up the most. For instance, I dare say that
you never heard of the Harlesden case?"

"No, no; I don't remember anything about it."

"Of course not. And yet the story is a curious one. I will tell it you
over our coffee. Harlesden, you know, or I expect you don't know, is
quite on the out-quarters of London; something curiously different from
your fine old crusted suburb like Norwood or Hampstead, different as
each of these is from the other. Hampstead, I mean, is where you look
for the head of your great China house with his three acres of land and
pine houses, though of late there is the artistic substratum; while
Norwood is the home of the prosperous middle-class family who took the
house 'because it was near the Palace,' and sickened of the Palace six
months afterwards; but Harlesden is a place of no character. It's too
new to have any character as yet. There are the rows of red houses and
the rows of white houses and the bright green venetians, and the
blistering doorways, and the little back-yards they call gardens, and a
few feeble shops, and then, just as you think you're going to grasp the
physiognomy of the settlement it all melts away."

"How the dickens is that? The houses don't tumble down before one's
eyes I suppose."

"Well, no, not exactly that. But Harlesden as an entity disappears.
Your street turns into a quiet lane, and your staring houses into elm
trees, and the back gardens into green meadows. You pass instantly from
town to country; there is no transition as in a small country town, no
soft gradations of wider lawns and orchards, with houses gradually
becoming less dense, but a dead stop. I believe the people who live
there mostly go into the city. I have seen once or twice a laden 'bus
bound thitherwards. But however that may be, I can't conceive a greater
loneliness in a desert at