A Random Itinerary

n Lanes exhibits the suburbanity of the London suburb in all its stages : raw fields, trenched, and littered with bricks ; raw terraces, red and yellow, newly tenanted; rawer terraces, red and yellow, waiting for tenants ; one or twoforlorn old houses; groups of trees, fragments of hedges, stray coffee-stalls, and a car line. In three minutes, the itinerant had left it all, and stood on the top of Mount Pleasant, among high elms that caught the wind, looking across fields of cattle, fields of buttercups, and miles of wooded country, new spires and old church-towers aglow in the veiled sunlight. The sky, a dome, ceiled in mosaic of blue, grey, and smoked porcelain, hung near the earth. Rain threatened all forenoon, but the north-east wind toiling along slowly, lifted the clouds up and away over London : very slowly, not till the early afternoon did the sky-porter manage to lug his voluminous burden of vapour over St Paul's and Westminster towards Surrey and the sea. In Tottenham, the itinerant asked the way to the Lea, and started a man on a bitter complaint about the Tottenham water-supply. ' The pressure's only 1 lb., and the New Riverhas 5 Ib. pressure. And it's muddy; they don't cheat us; it's Lea water, with plenty of body. There's only one old lift-pump down in the Lea there. Sometimes for days there's no supply in the houses at all; men come round with carts and hand out the water in jugs ; fact. Oh, you've no idea?none; you might as well be camping in...