THE VILLAGE 295 



Park House. If it were not for John Porter these 

 works would have to close. It is the house and 

 stables that keep the gas going. The quaint row of 

 old cottages, with their bits of dormer-windows half- 

 hidden by part of the high-banked swarded road, is 

 surely just the foreground which an artist would 

 choose for a view of the most picturesque outskirt of 

 the village. The stream, and trees, and high ground 

 beyond would complete the picture. Quaint cottages 

 on the right, each with its plot of sloping garden 

 buttressed by a wall of flints, and then, if you please, 

 the Montague and Capulet of the village, the rival 

 barbers and carriers. One signboard proclaims the 

 fact that A. Wickens is a haircutter and shaver who 

 attends to clients in the evening from six o'clock, 

 while further on E. Stroud takes the same means of 

 informing the unshorn and unshaven that he operates 

 on heads and chins from the same hour. It is grati- 

 fying to find that they compete on equal terms. 

 You would scarcely conceive, from the tiny propor- 

 tions of a shop which vends everything, from flour 

 and fat bacon to starch and powder blue, and is as 

 strong in brushes and biscuits as it is in crockery 

 ware of home manufacture, that Prior & Sons are, 

 agriculturally speaking, the Whiteleys of Kingsclere. 

 They are millers, corn, coal, cake, and provision 

 merchants, forage contractors to her Majesty's 

 Government, and goodness knows what all. Prior 

 & Sons export Hampshire hams to France, and hay 

 to Aldershot. On the opposite side of the street is 

 the Albert Hall, architecturally 'an adapted Renais- 



