air, an air of hiding from something that was looking for it. When
they had made up the pavement of the High Street, they
levelled that up so that one had to go down three steps into the
shop. Tom did his best to sell only his own excellent but
limited range of produce; but Progress came shoving things into
his window, French artichokes and aubergines, foreign apples--
apples from the State of New York, apples from California,
apples from Canada, apples from New Zealand, "pretty lookin'
fruit, but not what I should call English apples," said Tom--
bananas, unfamiliar nuts, grape fruits, mangoes.

The motor-cars that went by northward and southward grew more and
more powerful and efficient, whizzed faster and smelt worse,
there appeared great clangorous petrol trolleys delivering coal
and parcels in the place of vanishing horse-vans, motor-omnibuses
ousted the horse-omnibuses, even the Kentish strawberries going
Londonward in the night took to machinery and clattered instead
of creaking, and became affected in flavour by progress and
petrol.

And then young Bert Smallways got a motor bicycle....

2

Bert, it is necessary to explain, was a progressive Smallways.

Nothing speaks more eloquently of the pitiless insistence of
progress and expansion in our time than that it should get into
the Smallways blood. But there was something advanced and
enterprising about young Smallways before he was out of short