THE WALK CONTINUED. 39 



Innovation here is but the innovation of tlie 

 non-producing class. 



It is at the next village, Enford, that the 

 County Council can boast of its one and only 

 triumph in obtaining land for the people in the 

 vale of the Avon, and this had to be a com- 

 pulsory purchase from a vicar. Though it is 

 only 148 acres of glebe land, still it is a 

 beginning, an earnest, let us hope, of what is 

 to follow. It may mean the awakening of a 

 village which seems now to be sunk into a state 

 of torpor. But for one old man, and he a road- 

 mender, no one was visible in the village street 

 of thatched cottages, which must, I imagine, 

 be the same cottages as Cobbett looked upon 

 when he passed through this village in 1826. 



" I call to mind," said an old man to 

 me in the village inn, "when barrels and 

 barrels of beer were tapped in this house every 

 Saturday night. Now, what do they tap ? " 

 He looked around the dark old room, empty 

 of life save for himself and myself, and then 

 down pathetically at his empty pot A 

 beerometer would after all perhaps not be 

 amiss as a bucolic census indicator. 



We now come within tiie sphere of the 

 War Office, with the broad arrow visible on 



