48 THE EXETER ROAD 



the mists of history, because the last pikeman, whom 

 otherwise we might have asked, is dead, and gone to 

 Hades, where he probably is still going through a 

 series of shadowy encounters beside the shores of the 

 Styx with the ghosts of the Toms and Jerrys of long 

 ago, and offering to fight Charon for the price of his 

 ferry across the stream. 



But here we are at rural Knightsbridge, in 1837 

 as quiet a spot as you could find round London, with 

 scattered cottages of the rustic, rose-embowered kind. 

 Knightsbridge Green %vas a green in those days, and 

 not, as it is now, a squalid paved court. Then, and 

 for many years afterwards, the soldiers from the 

 neio'libourino- barracks would walk with the nurse- 

 maids in the country lanes, and take tea in the 

 tea-gardens which stood aw^ay behind the highroad 

 and were a feature of Brompton. Where are those 

 tea-gardens now, and where the toll-gate that barred 

 the road by the barracks ? Gone, my friends ; swei3t 

 away like the gossamer threads of the spiders that 

 spun webs in the arbours of those gardens and 

 dropped in the nursemaids' tea and the soldiers' beer. 

 Those soldiers and those nursemaids are gone too, else 

 it would be a pleasing, a curious, and an instructive 

 thing to take them, tottering in their old age, by the 

 hand and say : ' Here, my gallant warrior of eighty 

 years or so,' and ' Here, my pretty maiden of four- 

 score, is Knightsbridge, the self-same Knightsbridge 

 you knew, but with some new, and somewhat larger, 

 buildings.' They would be as strangers in a strange 

 land, and, dazed by the din of the thronging traffic 

 amid the sky-scraping buildings, beg to be taken 



