these American families of yours on the monuments and tombstones. You
know, of course, that district south of Evesham where every other church
monument bears the stars and stripes, the arms of departed Washingtons.
I doubt though if you'll still find the name about there. Nor will you
find many Hinkinsons in Market Saffron. But lots of this country here
has five or six hundred-year-old families still flourishing. That's why
Essex is so much more genuinely Old England than Surrey, say, or Kent.
Round here you'll find Corners and Fairlies, and then you get Capels,
and then away down towards Dunmow and Braintree Maynards and Byngs. And
there are oaks and hornbeams in the park about Claverings that have
echoed to the howling of wolves and the clank of men in armour. All the
old farms here are moated--because of the wolves. Claverings itself is
Tudor, and rather fine too. And the cottages still wear thatch...."

He reflected. "Now if you went south of London instead of northward it's
all different. You're in a different period, a different society. You're
in London suburbs right down to the sea. You'll find no genuine estates
left, not of our deep-rooted familiar sort. You'll find millionaires and
that sort of people, sitting in the old places. Surrey is full of rich
stockbrokers, company-promoters, bookies, judges, newspaper proprietors.
Sort of people who fence the paths across their parks. They do something
to the old places--I don't know what they do--but instantly the
countryside becomes a villadom. And little sub-estates and red-brick
villas and art cottages spring up. And a kind of new, hard neatness. And
pneumatic tyre and automobile spirit advertisements, great glaring
boards by the roadside. And all the poor people are inspected and rushed
about until they forget who their grandfathers were. They become villa
parasites and odd-job men, and grow basely rich and buy gramophones.
This Essex and yonder Surrey are as different as Russia and Germany. But
for one American who comes to look at Essex, twenty go to Godalming and