and the front door, and the Gypsy’s cart, the passer-by was apt to go on until he came to an ordinary building erected for the sale of beer and spirits, and for nothing else. Such a one lay not much further on, beyond a row of cottages contemporary with “The Woodman’s Arms.” These had long narrow gardens behind wooden posts and rails--gardens where everything tall, old-fashioned, and thick grew at their own sweet will, almost hiding the cottages of wood covered in creeper. You could just see that some were empty, their windows smashed or roughly boarded up, and that others were waiting for some old woman to die before they also had their windows smashed or boarded up. The dahlias, the rose-of-Sharon, the sweet rocket, the snow-on-the-mountains, the nasturtiums, the sunflowers, flourished too thick for weeds to make headway, and so probably with small help from the inhabitants, the gardens earned many a wave of the whip from passing drivers. The row of cottages meant “the first bit of country,” with a sweep at one end, a rat-catcher at the other, announced in modest lettering. Between the last of them and the new public-house a puddled lane ran up along old and thick, but much broken, hedges to the horse-slaughterer’s. “The Victoria Hotel” was built in the Jubilee year of that sovereign, and was a broad-faced edifice of brick with too conspicuous stone work round the windows and doorways and at the corners. The doors were many and mostly of glass. The landlord of “The Victoria” had no time to stand on his doorstep--whichever was his--like the landlord of “The Woodman”; moreover, all his doorsteps were right on the road, and he could have seen only the long row of cottages, by the same builder, which looked as if cut off from a longer, perhaps an endless row, with a pair of shears; while from the old inn could be seen grass sloping to the willows of the river, and a clump of elms hiding the factory chimneys. All the glass and brass of the “Victoria” shone spotless as if each customer out of the regiments in the crowded straight streets gave it a rub on entering and leaving.