larly
as he seemed at present to be singularly deficient in all the usual
hopes of childhood. But the pair tried to dismiss, for a while at
least, a too strenuously forward view.
There is in Upper Wessex an old town of nine or ten thousand souls;
the town may be called Stoke-Barehills. It stands with its gaunt,
unattractive, ancient church, and its new red brick suburb, amid
the open, chalk-soiled cornlands, near the middle of an imaginary
triangle which has for its three corners the towns of Aldbrickham
and Wintoncester, and the important military station of Quartershot.
The great western highway from London passes through it, near a point
where the road branches into two, merely to unite again some twenty
miles further westward. Out of this bifurcation and reunion there
used to arise among wheeled travellers, before railway days, endless
questions of choice between the respective ways. But the question
is now as dead as the scot-and-lot freeholder, the road waggoner,
and the mail coachman who disputed it; and probably not a single
inhabitant of Stoke-Barehills is now even aware that the two roads
which part in his town ever meet again; for nobody now drives up and
down the great western highway dally.
The most familiar object in Stoke-Barehills nowadays is its cemetery,
standing among some picturesque mediaeval ruins beside the railway;
the modern chapels, modern tombs, and modern shrubs having a look of
intrusiveness amid the crumbling and ivy-covered decay of the ancient
walls.
On a certain day, however, in the particular year which has now been
reached by this narrative--the month being early June--the features
of the town excite little interest, though many visitors arrive by
the trains; some down-trains, in especial, nearly emptying themselves
here. It is the week of the Great Wessex Agricultural Show, whose
vast encampment spreads over the open outskirts of the town like
the tents of an investing army. Rows of marquees, huts, booths,
pavilions, arcades, porticoes--every kind of structure short of
a permanent one--cover the green field for the space of a square
half-mile, and the crowds of arrivals walk through the town in
a mass, and make straight for the exhibition ground. The way
thereto is lined with shows, stalls, and hawkers on foot, who make
a market-place of the whole roadway to the show proper, and lead
some of the improvident to lighten their pockets appreciably before
they reach the gate
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