Oddities 
But she said, ‘‘ Never no more! I never was 
so hustled and bustled about in my life!” 
Not often perhaps would it have been so easy 
as in this case to assign a date to Mr. Smith’s 
teeming tales; yet often they had the air of old 
times hanging about them, like the reek of his 
father’s pot-kilns—a scent as of Farnborough 
village long ago. Oftener still his anecdotes 
were suggestive of that disagreeable transition 
period when the whole neighbourhood was 
demoralised by unsocial influences from the 
newly formed camp at Aldershot. Men without 
conscience or appreciation of old country interests 
—cunning, unscrupulous, selfish men, unre- 
Strained by any public opinion—made haste to 
grow rich in all sorts of pettifogging and ignorant 
ways, which John Smith saw and remembered 
years afterwards. 
For example, there was a usurer he spoke of, 
quite typical of that time, though neither his name 
nor his habitation was told. The man cannot 
have been a member of the old village; yet again, 
rogues nowadays dare not be quite so crude in 
roguery as he was—it doesn’t pay well enough. 
He dates from the transition. He was just 
the sort of man of whom the Aldershot district 
attracted too many, when there was as yet no 
firmly established social life to put any curb on 
them. This is what Mr. Smith told of him. 
63 
