We set Walter ashore on the Berkshire side, amidst all the beauties
of Streatley, and so went our ways into what once would have been the
deeper country under the foot-hills of the White Horse; and though
the contrast between half-cocknified and wholly unsophisticated
country existed no longer, a feeling of exultation rose within me (as
it used to do) at sight of the familiar and still unchanged hills of
the Berkshire range.

We stopped at Wallingford for our mid-day meal; of course, all signs
of squalor and poverty had disappeared from the streets of the
ancient town, and many ugly houses had been taken down and many
pretty new ones built, but I thought it curious, that the town still
looked like the old place I remembered so well; for indeed it looked
like that ought to have looked.

At dinner we fell in with an old, but very bright and intelligent
man, who seemed in a country way to be another edition of old
Hammond. He had an extraordinary detailed knowledge of the ancient
history of the country-side from the time of Alfred to the days of
the Parliamentary Wars, many events of which, as you may know, were
enacted round about Wallingford. But, what was more interesting to
us, he had detailed record of the period of the change to the present
state of things, and told us a great deal about it, and especially of
that exodus of the people from the town to the country, and the
gradual recovery by the town-bred people on one side, and the
country-bred people on the other, of those arts of life which they
had each lost; which loss, as he told us, had at one time gone so far
that not only was it impossible to find a carpenter or a smith in a