The dimensions of the topic were, as I ascertained for my own satisfaction, nine feet broad by seven feet high. This was the _premier pas_. It led to the extravagance of a sunk letter sign, picked out in gold, an outside lamp, and a spring sun-blind, all of the most conventional pattern, and all to my mind in the condition of the “party in a parlour” in the Wordsworth parody. In short, a charming old house with many features of interest was transformed into a foolish hybrid thing--a single sheet of plate-glass on the ground floor, beneath two pairs of small cottage casements with delightful stone eaves. So prosperity turns out the picturesque or, at least, relegates it to the basement, and so a street with all the charm of past centuries clinging to it is fast becoming commonplace, and strangers driving through it laugh at the feeble attempts to give the commercial air of Harrods to a row of cottages--about as sensible a proceeding as it would be to attempt to assimilate the façade of Hampton Court with that of Hampton's in Pall Mall. Happily there are still some sixteenth-century eaves left and also some eighteenth-century bow windows--the gentle curved bow of the eighteenth century, not the detestable obtuse-angle things of the mid-nineteenth--and happily the spirit of commercial enterprise does not pervade the entire community. Several of the houses that have been turned into shops contain admirable chimneypieces and panelled rooms, with an occasional fire-back and basket grate. It seems, too, that there must have lived in the place a century or so ago a master workman with a great fancy for decorating chimneypieces after the style of Adam; for in many of the rooms of sixteenth-century houses may be found quite good examples of the early style of Robert Adam. In one house there is a fine parlour decorated throughout in this way. II.--PRECIOUS PANELLING