CHAPTER VIII 



IN LONDON AND THE SUBURBS 



A GREAT part of 1876— his twenty-eighth year — was 

 spent at Sydenham, and about that time his earliest 

 descriptive essays appeared in the Graphic. He must 

 have gone up to find a suitable house near London, yet 

 at the edge of the country, and to make sure of his 

 journalistic connections. This was that bitter time of 

 which he speaks in ' The Story of My Heart,' when it was 

 necessary to be separated from his family. ' There is 

 little indeed,' he wrote, ' in the more immediate suburbs 

 of London to gratify the sense of the beautiful. Yet 

 there was a cedar by which I used to walk up and down 

 and think the same thoughts as under the great oak in 

 the solitude of the sunlit meadows.' Early in 1877 he 

 and his wife and child left Victoria Street, Swindon, for 

 2, Woodside, Surbiton. Woodside is a small block of 

 whitish, stuccoed, fiat-fronted houses of two stories, 

 just beyond the last shops and just before Douglas 

 Road, on the right-hand side of the Ewell road as you 

 go to Tol worth by the electric tram. No. 2 is the second 

 house towards Ewell, and has a poor small fir behind the 

 railings of the front garden. It has been overtaken by 

 London for some time, though its front windows have a 

 swelling, leafy view of Hounslow, Richmond Park, and 

 Wimbledon Common on one side, and of Hook, Chessing- 

 ton, Claygate, and their woods, on the other. Tolworth 

 Farm is but a few yards past the tramway terminus ; and 

 the flat, elmy meadows, though they retain the scattered 



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