MY LITERARY WORK 91 



with whose amiable and intellectual family we spent many 

 pleasant Sunday afternoons. Colonel Hope had here laid 

 out a large sewage farm, and had for years carried out ex- 

 periments demonstrating the fact that many agricultural 

 crops could be grown on absolutely sterilized sand by the 

 application of sewage in proper quantities. He had urged 

 that the whole of the London sewage, instead of being emptied 

 into the Thames near Barking, should be carried on to the 

 Maplin sands, where about ten thousand acres of land could 

 be reclaimed and fertilized so as to grow a large portion of 

 the vegetable food for London. This would have been the 

 cheaper method in the end, saving the pollution of the whole 

 tidal course of the Thames and the enormous annual cost of 

 dredging required to partially remedy that pollution. Instead 

 of this wasteful expenditure, the rental of the reclaimed land, 

 with the fertilizing sewage, might have been so large as to 

 fully repay the extra expenditure, and at the same time give 

 us an unpolluted stream in our capital city. But the plan was 

 too grand to be accepted, and we continue to pay the penalty. 

 In the following year I found near the village of Grays, 

 on the Thames, twenty miles from London, a picturesque old 

 chalk-pit which had been disused so long that a number of 

 large elms and a few other trees had grown up in its less 

 precipitous portions. The chalk here was capped by about 

 twenty feet of Thanet sand and pleistocene gravel, and from 

 the fields at the top there was a beautiful view over Erith 

 to the Kent hills and down a reach of the Thames to 

 Gravesend, forming a most attractive site for a house. After 

 some difficulty I obtained a lease for ninety-nine years of four 

 acres, comprising the pit itself, an acre of the field on the 

 plateau above, and about an equal amount of undulating 

 cultivable ground between the pit and the lane which gave 

 access to it. I had to pay seven pounds an acre rent, as the 

 owner could not sell it, and though I thought it very dear, 

 as so much of it was unproductive, the site was so picturesque, 

 and had such capabilities of improvement, that I thought it 

 would be a fair investment. The owner lived at Winchester, 

 and when I went down there to see him and arrange the 



