ings and attempt to solve the housing question. What shall be the defects of their qualities, no doubt Time, with the revolution of her wheel, will bring to light. Perhaps the County Council will be forced to play the part of the squire of country villages, to insist that the tenants' floors are washed, and the faces of their children, and that may be an interference with the liberty of the subject. But for the moment these houses, empty still, clean still, and standing on a green field, are stimulating, and, as I have said, impressive. Electric trams are to link this village of so many thousand, let into a district of a million or so, with Westminster, with Blackfriars, and with London Bridge.
There are ancient houses, late Georgian, that peer, as if querulously, over the side hoardings. They seem to gloom behind high walls, in the shadow of tall trees, at the end of black gardens. They are painted white, with glass excrescences, observatories, perhaps, on their roofs among the chimneys and boughs. Once they were the considerable houses of an exclusive village. They were built when macadam roads had gradually become practicable for carriages of the leisured and the well off. Now the County Council houses and their trams shall, in the same spot, serve the hurried and the not rich, by right of roads.
Touching these few houses is a short, more modern but still old, double line of shops. The more reputable touch the most jumbled; they have been made by building sale rooms out over old gardens, from small ground floors to the line of the pavement,—old-curiosity
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