I have some doubts about it myself; so suppose you call me
Guest, which is a family name, you know, and add William to it if you please.«
    Dick nodded kindly to me; but a shade of anxiousness passed over the
weaver's face, and he said:
    »I hope you don't mind my asking, but would you tell me where you come from?
I am curious about such things for good reasons, literary reasons.«
    Dick was clearly kicking him underneath the table; but he was not much
abashed, and awaited my answer somewhat eagerly. As for me, I was just going to
blurt out Hammersmith, when I bethought me what an entanglement of cross
purposes that would lead us into; so I took time to invent a lie with
circumstance, guarded by a little truth, and said:
    »You see, I have been such a long time away from Europe that things seem
strange to me now; but I was born and bred on the edge of Epping Forest;
Walthamstow and Woodford, to wit.«
    »A pretty place, too,« broke in Dick; »a very jolly place, now that the
trees have had time to grow again since the great clearing of houses in 1955.«
    Quoth the irrepressible weaver: »Dear neighbour, since you knew the Forest
some time ago, could you tell me what truth there is in the rumour that in the
nineteenth century the trees were all pollards?«
    This was catching me on my archæological natural-history side, and I fell
into the trap without any thought of where and when I was; so I began on it,
while one of the girls, the handsome one, who had been scattering little twigs
of lavender and other sweet-smelling herbs about the floor, came near to listen,
and stood behind me with her hand on my shoulder, in which she held some of the
plant that I used to call balm: its strong sweet smell brought back to my mind
my very early days in the kitchen-garden at Woodford, and the large blue plums
which grew on the wall beyond the sweet-herb patch, - a connection of memories
which all boys will see at once.
    I started off: »When I was a boy, and for long after, except for a piece
about Queen Elizabeth's Lodge, and for the part about High Beech, the Forest was
almost wholly made up of pollard hornbeams mixed with holly thickets. But when
the Corporation of London took it over about twenty-five years ago, the topping
and lopping