Chapter 8 Oddities 
LTHOUGH he never seemed to seek 
for such things, Mr. Smith so often 
turned up odd memories of odd people 
as to give the impression that he must 
have met more than his share of queer folk in 
his time. The characters others read of in 
novels seemed to have shown themselves off more 
vividly to him; he had seen them in the flesh. 
That was the impression he often gave. Yet, 
in fact, it may have been his own whimsical 
humour that sought and found peculiarity in 
persons whom others found quite ordinary and 
dull. 
It is, indeed, just possible that, in his memories 
of an earlier era, truly comical glimpses did 
arise from the clash of older ways against newer 
ways. Thus it sounded quaint to hear, though 
it is not very quaint to repeat, about that old 
lady—‘‘ Old Nanny,” he called her—who took 
a train journey when trains were new things. 
Very adventurously—she must have been almost 
flighty—Old Nanny actually travelled by train 
all the way from Farnborough to Blackwater— 
three miles or so—soon after the South-Eastern 
line had been opened in that neighbourhood. 
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