And those lone wayside greens, no man’s gardens, measuring a few feet wide but many miles in length--why should they be used either as receptacles for the dust of motor-cars or as additions to the property of the landowner who happens to be renewing his fence? They used to be as beautiful and cool and fresh as rivers, these green sisters of the white roads--illuminated borders of many a weary tale. But now, lest there should be no room for the dust, they are turning away from them the gypsies who used to camp there for a night. The indolent District Council that is anxious to get rid of its difficulties--for the moment--at the expense of a neighbouring district--it cares not--will send out its policemen to drive away the weary horses and sleeping children from the acre of common land which had hitherto been sacred--to what?--to an altar, a statue, a fountain, a seat?--No! to a stately notice-board; half-a-century ago the common of which this is a useless patch passed on easy terms to the pheasant lords. The gypsies have to go. Give them a pitch for the night and you are regarded as an enemy of the community or perhaps even as a Socialist. The gypsies shall be driven from parish to parish, and finally settle down as squalid degenerate nomads in a town where they lose what beauty and courage they had, in adding to the difficulties of another council. Yet if they were in a cage or a compound which it cost money to see, hundreds would pay for a stare at their brown faces and bright eyes, their hooped tents, their horses, their carelessness of the crowd, and in a few years an imitation of these things will be applauded in a “pageant” of the town which has destroyed the reality. The grassy way ends with the moor at a pool beside a road, on one side of it six thatched cottages fenced by sycamore and ash and elm, on the other a grey farm and immense brown barn, within a long wall roofed with mossy thatch; and the swallows fly low and slowly about the trees.