My story is of Balham and of a family dwelling in Balham who were more Welsh than Balhamitish. Strangers to that neighbourhood who go up Harrington Road from the tram must often wonder why the second turning on the right is called Abercorran Street: the few who know Abercorran town itself, the long grey and white street, with a castle at one end, low down by the river mouth, and an old church high up at the other, must be delighted by the memories thus recalled, but they also must wonder at the name. Abercorran Street is straight, flat, symmetrically lined on both sides by four-bedroomed houses in pairs, and it runs at right angles out of Harrington Road into another road which the pair of four-bedroomed houses visible at the corner proclaim to be exactly like it. The only external variety in the street is created by the absence from two of the cast-iron gates of any notice prohibiting the entrance of hawkers and canvassers. When I myself first saw the white lettering on a blue ground of ABERCORRAN STREET I was perhaps more surprised than most others have been who paid any attention to it. I was surprised but not puzzled. I knew very well why it was called Abercorran Street. For I knew Abercorran House and the Morgans, its inhabitants, and the dogs and the pigeons thereof. Who that ever knew the house and the people could ever forget them? I knew the Morgans, the father and mother, the five sons, the one daughter Jessie. I knew the house down to the kitchen, because I knew old Ann, the one permanent--I had almost written immortal--servant, of whom it was said by one knowing the facts, that they also rule who only serve and wait. I knew the breakfast room where breakfast was never finished; the dark Library where they had all the magazines which have since died of their virtues; the room without a name which was full of fishing-rods, walking-sticks, guns, traps, the cross-bow, boxes of skins, birds’ eggs, papers, old books, pictures, pebbles from a hundred beaches, and human bones. I knew the conservatory crowded with bicycles and what had been tricycles. I knew as well as any one the pigeon-houses, the one on a pole and the one which was originally a fowl-house, built with some idea or fancy regarding profit. I knew that well-worn square of blackened gravel at the foot of the back steps, where everybody had to pass to go to the conservatory, the pigeon-houses, and the wild garden beyond, and where the sun was always shining on men and children and dogs. This square was railed off from the rest of the garden. That also I knew, its four-and-twenty elms that stood about the one oak in the long grass and buttercups and docks, like a pleasant company slowly and unwillingly preparing to leave that three-acre field which was the garden of Abercorran House and called by us The Wilderness--a name now immortalised, because the christener of streets has given it to the one beyond Abercorran Street. Under the trees lay a pond containing golden