The streets of Lewisham the long end, in the present year of grace, a little beyond Rushey Green, where a side-road comes in from Forest Hill and Catford Bridge. Shall we pluck the rushes of Rushey Green, wander awhile in the groves of Forest Hill, or gather primroses by the river’s brim at Catford Bridge? God bless you, ye innocent, there are no forests but forests of chimneys at Forest Hill, and the rushes of Rushey Green have long been replaced by macadam and York stone pavements; and although, I doubt not, you can find primroses in their season at Catford Bridge, they are only those that are sold by the flower-girls outside the railway-station, at what they style, in their Cockney twang, “one punny a morky barnch,” a phrase which has been translated into English by the learned as meaning “one penny a market bunch.” Although the road onwards from Rushey Green becomes in a little distance rural, or at the worst dotted only here and there sporadically with new houses, there are marked signs that the fields and the remaining hedgerows are doomed. Among these unmistakable portents is the new railway-station of Bellingham, placed at the present time lonely, in the midst of fields, near the solitary Bellingham Farm. No railway company builds a large station for the express purpose of serving one farmhouse, and this is simply another instance of that intelligent anticipation of events for which railway companies are now showing an unwonted aptitude. Time was when the companies would tardily provide station accommodation ten years or so after the appearance of a thronged suburb, and then only after being memorialised to do so; but a different policy now rules: it is the policy suggested by the depleted pocket. If, however, the main road remains rural, things are far otherwise over to the eastward, between this and Burnt Ash, where the octopus arms of the Corbett Estate are spreading out and embracing the fields in a deadly grip. The long lines of streets and roofs, ascending the hillside, may be discerned from the highway, and it is abundantly evident that London is making a sly flank march that way, into Kent. The Corbett Estate is, it should be said, a building estate of cheap houses, chiefly for working men, and is administered on “temperance” lines, public-houses for the sale of drink being forbidden. Here, then, we see the working of one of those many fads for the making of a perfect community which distinguishes the present age. Here it is a Community of the Pump that is aimed at; there a Garden City, and elsewhere other nostrums are on trial, all directed towards the hastening of the millennium. But the wheels of progress towards perfection are not to be set rolling at anything above their normal speed by even the best intentioned, armed with the most exceptional opportunities, and this thirsty Sahara among suburbs irrigates itself just the same, albeit with considerable trouble.