IF OUR THURSWELL IS A TYPICAL English village, assuredly Mallingham is a typical country town, only inclining to the picturesque side rather than the sordid. Like most picturesque towns, it is more highly appreciated by strangers than by its own inhabitants. Its one long street crawls along a ridge of the Downs, and from the lower level of the road that skirts this ridge and meanders among fat farms and luscious meadows, with an old Norman church here and there embowered in immemorial elms and granges mentioned in _Domesday Book_, steep lanes of old houses climb to the business street. It is really impossible to reach the town without a climb of some sort; and this fact, which made the site an ideal one, from the standpoint of the mediaeval founders of its walls and gates, remnants of which may yet be discovered by any one searching for them in a true archaeological spirit, causes a good deal of grumbling among the residents on both levels, who have to face many climbs in the course of an ordinary day's work. But motoring strangers, who pass through the town by the hundred every day, travelling between the two fashionable coast resorts, glance down the narrow lanes and say, “How simply lovely!” or “Doesn't it remind you of Nuremberg?” Perhaps it does remind them of Nuremberg--I have known people who affected to be reminded of Sorrento at Brighton--but for my part Mallingham only reminds me of an English country town, the convenient centre for a ten-mile area of villages. Enough business is done in its properly called High Street to allow of two banks keeping their doors open, and of half a dozen shopkeepers making modest fortunes in the course of a hundred years or so, and retiring from their half-timbered places of business to the avenue of red brick villas with well fires and radiators which an enterprising “developer” of one of the manors perceived to be a long-felt want. But the shops go on from generation to generation with the old names over the front, and in many cases with the family of the new generation living on the premises in the good old way. Only in this sense, however, may the tradesmen be said to be “above their business”; there is not the least disposition on the part of any of them to appear anything beyond what they are, for the simple reason that they do not think that the world holds anything better than a Mallingham tradesman. And, indeed, I am not sure that the world holds anything less ambitious. The aspirations of most of them do not go beyond the acquiring of a plate-glass frontage. Occasionally this dream literally crystallises, and when the crates are known to be actually awaiting delivery at the Goods Station, the “consignee” of the waybill is pointed out to strangers by the simple casement shopkeepers with bated breath and an occasional break in the voice. It is understood that the plate-glass front can only be achieved by a limited number of traders, and for years