In the stores in the main street were always small, many-paned windows. There were no lights as yet and the rooms into which I peered and the private doors gave glimpses of things which reminded me of the poorest, most backward and desolate sections of our own country. I saw an automobile here and there, not many, and some girls on bicycles,--not very good looking. Say what you will, you could not find an atmosphere like this in an American town, however small, unless it had already been practically abandoned. It would not contain a contented population of three or four hundred. Instead of saloons I saw “wine and spirit merchants” and also “Mrs. Jane Sawyer, licensed wine and spirit dealer.” The butcher shops were the most American things I saw, because their ruddy goods were all displayed in front with good lights behind, and the next best things were the candy stores. Dressmakers, milliners, grocers, hardware stores, wine shops, anything and everything--were apparently concealed by solid gray walls or at best revealed by small-paned windows. In the fading afternoon I walked about hunting for schools, some fine private houses, some sense of modernness--but no--it was not there. I noticed that in two directions the town came abruptly to an end, as though it had been cut off by a knife, and smooth, open, green fields began. In the distance you could see other towns standing out like the castellated walls of earlier centuries--but here was an end, sharp, definite, final. I saw at one place--the end of one of these streets and where the country began--an old gray man in a shabby black coat bending to adjust a yoke to his shoulders to the ends of which were attached two buckets filled with water. He had been into a low, gray, one-story inn entitled, “Ye Bank of England,” before which was set a bench and also a stone hitching post. For all the world he looked like some old man in Hardy, wending his fading, reflective way homeward. I said to myself here--England is old; it is evening in England and they are tired. I went back toward the heart of things along another street, but I found after a time it was merely taking me to another outer corner of the town. It was gray now, and I was saying to my young companions that they must be hurrying on home--that I did not intend to go back so soon. “Say I will not be home for dinner,” I told them, and they left after a time, blessed with some modern chocolate which they craved very much.