hill on which it stood. Living entirely on its
ploughs, it yet had but little of the true look of a British factory
town, having been for the most part built since ideas came into fashion.
With its red roofs and chimneys, it was only moderately ugly, and here
and there an old white, timbered house still testified to the fact that
it had once been country. On this fine Sunday afternoon the population
were in the streets, and presented all that long narrow-headedness, that
twist and distortion of feature, that perfect absence of beauty in face,
figure, and dress, which is the glory of the Briton who has been
for three generations in a town. 'And my great-grandfather'--thought
Felix--'did all this! God rest his soul!'

At a rather new church on the very top they halted, and went in to
inspect the Morton memorials. There they were, in dedicated corners.
'Edmund and his wife Catherine'--'Charles Edmund and his wife
Florence'--'Maurice Edmund and his wife Dorothy.' Clara had set her foot
down against 'Stanley and his wife Clara' being in the fourth; her soul
was above ploughs, and she, of course, intended to be buried at Becket,
as Clara, dowager Lady Freeland, for her efforts in regard to the land.
Felix, who had a tendency to note how things affected other people,
watched Derek's inspection of these memorials and marked that they
excited in him no tendency to ribaldry. The boy, indeed, could hardly be
expected to see in them what Felix saw--an epitome of the great, perhaps
fatal, change that had befallen his native country; a record of the
beginning of that far-back fever, whose course ran ever faster, which
had emptied country into town and slowly, surely, changed the whole
spirit of life. When Edmund Moreton, about 1780, took the infection
disseminated by the development of machinery, and left the farming of
his acres to make money, that thing was done which they were all now
talking about trying to undo, with their cries of: "Back to the land!
Back to peace and sanity in the shade of the elms! Back to the simple
and patriarchal state of feeling which old documents disclose. Back to
a time before these little squashed heads and bodies and features jutted
every which way; before there were long squashed streets of gray houses;
long squashed chimneys emitting smoke-blight; long squashed rows of
graves; and long squashed columns of the daily papers. Back to well-fed
countrymen who could not read, with Common rights, and a kin