Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/58

 door in the other half of the dog-kennel; but I don't know who he lent it to.

This is no democratic touch, because I'm supposed to be a democrat in a democratic country. It is no literary trick. This was five years ago, and a sign on the face of it of the great change that was coming and is coming to English politics. That the white world never dreamed would come to England. Was it only one sign of the silent, sullen seeming undercurrent of thought, that was going on in that and hundreds of other English villages.

And to such a village had come, some three or four years ago, little Billy with his smile.

And while Billy is getting used to conditions which are strangely new to him after exile to London and a nightmare "abroad," and while men and women are getting used to Billy, who has never changed, I'll tell you of something else.

I have neither stage-room nor time to describe the villages, fairs and gipsies connected with them, though I've seen fairs, from one at Little Hilliford (where Sykes and Oliver Twist passed that morning) to Islington Fair, which is a surprisingly small and cramped affair for its name and fame as indeed are most other famous things in London, from St. Paul's, which seems a dirty old toy at first Australian sight, to the Angel at Islington, or The Cheshire Cheese, in Wine Court Ally, Strand, where, in the little cramped, sawdusted dining-room The Immortal British Bore sat in a corner (where a marble plate on the wall now records the fact) before he got up and