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 backyards 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 midnight than there is there at midday. It is
like a city of the dead; the streets are glaring and desolate, and as
you pass it suddenly strikes you that this too is part of London. Well,
a year or two ago there was a doctor living there; he had set up his
brass plate and his red lamp at the very end of one of those shining
streets, and from the back of the house, the fields stretched away to
the north. I don't know what his reason was in settling down in such an
out-of-the-way place, perhaps Dr. Black, as we will call him, was a
far-seeing man and looked ahead. His relations, so it appeared
afterwards, had lost sight of him for many years and didn't even know he
was a doctor, much less where he lived. H