hedgerows, church towers moving rapidly as if drawn along among clumps of trees, on the horizon; then come brickfields, inn signs, more signboards, a roadside house, bits of paper on the footpath, then a bus, dust whitening hedges, whitening them more, a villa, half a dozen villas, then new shops set one into another without a break, a swift glimpse of a great plain of roofs, gray and without visible limits, a long way below; a swift drop down a slope—a drop that one feels more internally than through the eyes—and one is dodging the close traffic, slowing down, slipping past a dray, boring a hansom in towards the pavement, and it is all over.
We stepped into the thing in our own farmyard; we seem to come to ourselves only in the middle of the familiar things of town, in the light filtering down between the tall buildings, before our own white doorstep, and the outstretched hand, pale in the palm, brown in the fingers, of an urchin who has, or has not, saved the lady's dress from touching the wheel, is before us. We have not been able to differentiate Mill Hill from the Welsh Harp district; Brentford was Chiswick and the Goldhawk Road before one had left the upper river; the Old Kent Road became the Borough High Street after we were hardly out of Maidstone.
It is not so much that the speed is very great, there is always the statutory limit, a sort of nightmare; but the motorist is too low down as a rule, the air presses against the eyes and half closes them; he has a tendency to look forward along the road, to see more of vehicles
38
