place any more, the old fairs were just common nuisances haunted by

gypsies, van showmen, Cheap Jacks and London roughs, the churches

were incapable of a quarter of the population. One or two local

papers of shameless veniality reported the proceedings of the local

Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen who were interested

in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet "Bromstedian" as one

expressing peculiarvirtues, and so maintained in the generalmind a

weak tradition of some local quality that embraced us all. Then the

parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and an ambitious

area with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead Cemetery

Company, and planted with suitably high-minded andsorrowful

varieties of conifer. A stonemason took one of the earlier villas

with a front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a

supply of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone,

marble, and granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in

elaborate detail the entire population of Bromstead as one found it

in 1750.

The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was

in the full tide of building andgrowth from the first; the second

railway with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage

followed when I was ten or eleven, and all my childishmemories are

of digging and wheeling, of woods invaded by building, roads gashed

open and littered with iron pipes amidst afearfulsmell of gas, of

men peeped at andseen toiling away deep down in excavations, of

hedges broken down and replaced by planks, of wheelbarrows and

builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and swallowed up by drain-

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