Barstoke, Barstoke in the ’teens of the century, how shall I ever describe you? How communicate your atmosphere to the generation that will soon have the pride of dating its letters with three noughts? The stone-walled court by which you approached the front door, the mellow façade of plaster, dating from the Fourth William, the terraces, the beds with their quaint, tiled borders, the open lawn on which in those days one used to play tennis, the box-hedges, cut as you never see them cut now, the kitchen garden, with its warm brick walls, wasp-haunted, yet dangling prizes to the adventurous. The wide hall, panelled all through in pitch-pine, surrounded with the trophies of the chase and the spoils of our ancestors; “heads” of stags shot (if you please) on British soil; salmon found in Scottish lochs; arquebuses, flintlock muskets, Mills bombs, and every form of obsolete artillery. The dining-room, with its great maple-wood sideboard, that had facings of beaten copper; all the walls hung with priceless old photogravures from pictures by Landseer and Dicksee (I have seen £150 offered for a pair of these lately at Frosting’s). The “drawing-room,” as it was still called, with its gold-backed velvet chairs, its satin-textured wall-paper, its marble mantelpiece and encaustic-tiled fireplace; where, on a winter evening, my father would sit down with his friends to “bridge” or “auction,” or, as a treat for myself, the then popular gramophone would elicit its curious, drawling imitation of the airs of the day. And over all this, when the curtains were drawn at evening, not the vulgar glare of our modern electrics, but the old acetylene gas that was even then going out of fashion, but used to shed, unless I deceive myself, a more equable and a more desirable radiance.