Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/504

74 amid a native shrubbery, and Uriah thrust a walking-stick to its very handle into the rich black soil, and when his friends expressed their surprise, he told them that the soil there was fourteen feet deep, and would grow any quantity of produce for ages without manuring. Indeed, they passed through green corn of the most hixuriant character, and, crossing the bridge of a brook which there fell into the river, they found themselves under the acacias; by the river side there lay huge prostrate trunks of ancient gum trees, the patriarchs of the forest, which had fallen and given place to the acacia, and now reminded the spectators that they were still in the land of primitive woods.

"Why, Tattenhall," said Robinson to my brother Uriah, "Trumpington Cottage, my dear fellow, would cut a poor figure after this. I'd ask any lord or gentleman to show me a fertiler or more desirable place in the tight little island. Bigger houses they may be, and are, but not to my mind more desirable. Do you know, very large houses always seem to me a sort of asylums for supernumerary servants—the master can only occupy a corner there—he cuts out quite small in the bulk. And as to fertility, this beats Battersea Fields and Fulham hollow. Those market-gardeners might plant and plant to all eternity, always taking out and never putting in, and if they could grow peaches, apricots, grapes, figs, twice a year, and all that is fine in the open air as they do in hot-houses, and sell their bunches of parsley at sixpence apiece, and water-melons—gathered from any gravel heap or dry open field—at five shillings apiece, plentiful as pumpkins, wouldn't they astonish themselves?

"But what makes you call this place Bowstead?" continued Robinson, breaking off a small wattle-bough to whisk the flies from his face." Or has named his Abbotsford—that's because he's a Scotchman: and we've got Cremorne Gardens, and Richmond, and Hawthorne, and all sorts of English names about here;—but Bowstead! I can't make it out."

"You can't?" said Uriah, smiling; "don't you see that the river cuives in a bow here, and stead is a place?"

"Oh! that's it," said Robinson; "I fancied it was to remind you of Bow Bells."

"There you have it," said Bob, laughing. "Bow