Chapter 2. Dog-Traction 
N impression of bustling aétivity, in 
old Farnborough of all quiet places, 
sometimes grew out of John Smith’s 
references to the earlier days of his 
recollection. Not always, of course. When he 
spoke of the herds of Welsh cattle or of the 
flocks of Welsh sheep, the imagined sound of 
innumerable pattering hoofs took the fancy far 
from bustle to heath-commons and unfrequented 
roads; and an even quieter glimpse came for a 
moment, when he happened to mention that he 
had seen flocks of geese on the turnpike. It was 
after a remark of my own. I had mentioned 
to him Cobbett’s talk about thousands of geese 
on the commons between Chobham Ridges and 
Farnham. “Very likely,” John Smith assented. 
““T remember flocks of them—two hundred at a 
time perhaps—being driven along the road on 
the way to London.” To think of it is to think 
of a road where no traffic was likely to be passing 
for hours. After the slow geese had gone by 
utter silence would return to it. 
But something of a clatter woke up in the 
fancy—a speedy rattling of wheels—when he told 
how hawkers were wont to visit Farnborough, in 
little coster carts drawn by dogs. Leaving a 
se 
