GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 7

legions of the money-makers were there on sufferance: back in
the shires from which they or their fathers came, they paid the
common immemorial tribute to the lords of hereditary status
and acre. Down In his native Wessex by the sea, superior Dosset,
master of London bricks and mortar, touched his cap with his
yeoman cousinry to the squire of Lulworth or Osmington, Here
In London he fought for a footing In a crowded hurly-burly from
which "status was lacking for all but the richest. Even for his
place In the omnibus—the advancing chariot of democracy-—he
had to rise betimes and struggle: for In the race for money,
many were called and few chosen and the prize was only to the
assiduous, the pertinacious and the thrifty. In 1837 London only
boasted 400 narrow, three-windowed, two-horse buses and 1200
dirty hooded gigs or cabs, with a total carrying capacity of less
than ten thousand, v ;

;• - Other public conveyances there were none. The river, whose
scourings the tides could no longer cleanse, had ceased to be the
city's waterway: the watermen who had ferried the generations
of the past between the stone stairs were dying out. Mostly.
London tramped' over the cobbles to Its labour, nearly a hundred
thousand pedestrians daily crossing London Bridge.' In those
narrow crowded streets Shanks's .pony generally proved the
swiftest mount: with long swinging strides the Londoner
covered his morning and evening miles and went abroad for
country rambles after his midday Sunday dinner. The studious
Macaulay thought nothing of walking for recreation from his
chambers in the Albany to New Cross or riverside Greenwich.

It was a London that still had a country appetite. It ate not
because It wanted vitamins but because it was hungry. At midday
the new London sat down in a panelled steaming chop-house—at
Cock, Rainbow or Cheshire Cheese and many a humbler horse-box
hostlery—to devour steaks, joints, chops and porter, cheese,
potatoes and greens, usualty with hot spirits and water to follow.
Off liver and bacon at iod., a pint of stout at 4|-d., potatoes, bread,
cheese and celery one could dine very comfortably for 2/- and
leave- a pile of coppers for that loquacious piece of old England,
the waiter. Men whose immediate forebears had been hale and
hearty* farmers would think nothing of tackling at a sitting a
boiled leg of mutton with ^carrots, turnips and dumplings,
black pudding of pigs' and sheeps' trotters, tripe and faggots and
pease pudding. In their appetites the gentry were at one with the