Dog- Traction 
inns and roads and home parlours—where, of 
course, all details came to be talked over at last. 
Yet after all it amounts to nothing. The dogs 
and their carts might rattle across the village, the 
slow waggons from the coast might encourage a 
weekly fish-market; farmers might congregate, 
with loud sapient voices, at the property sales at 
the “ Tumbledown Dick ’”’; but with it all Farn- 
borough remained incurably quiet in its surround- 
ing heaths. Listen to this—a stray reminiscence 
of John Smith’s. 
When the farm horses, he related, were at a 
contract at Heatherfield Nursery, he was wont to 
go, of a summer night, on to the mound behind 
the kiln at the pottery; and from there he could 
hear the horses, three miles away. As I have 
heard others tell similar things it isn’t necessary 
to attribute exceptionally good hearing to John 
Smith. But it is well to remember how quiet 
the summer nights could be in Farnborough, 
when horse footfalls could be heard three miles 
away. 
29 
