An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

92 AUTOBIOGRAPHY to drive through the water, but took the opportunity of seeing Dryden's birthplace. A week after I sat down where no seat was, in a railway carriage, with painful results. Later on I went to Lynn, where, on the 21st, saw a very high tide. On the 9th March I heard that J.B.R. had won the "Arnold." This month I had a slight fall off trike at shed at the " Hale," and cut my left knee. On another occasion I had a long ride from Richmond, Walton Bridge, Cobham (lunch at "Lion") and back to Roehampton, 3r miles, slept at" King's Head," and back to Hampstead the next day. On another in the same month I started for St. Albans, but valve (?) went at Stanmore, so slept at "Aber corn Arms," and rode back next day. A most wet run, 3½ hours. By the 28th March the flats next door to me at Hampstead were well advanced, and so was my blocking wall, which was, I believe, the highest independent wall in London, 42 ft. high and 6 ft. thick at the bottom. It was of good red brick, neatly black pointed on my side, with handsome three-storied buttresses, and of common white bricks on the enemy's side, where it came within one or two feet of his windows, and I need hardly say blocked all the new lights he had hoped to have created looking over my lawn. Thi unlooked for retaliation enraged him extremely, and he began in return to hang out all sorts of dirty old clothes opposite my house. As I bad paid him a con– siderable sum to build the side wall of his houses in red b1 ick I could, I think, have stopped this, but waited, and when he found he could not let any of his flats he at last pulled them down. The wall and the planting trees cost me nearly £ r ,ooo, but it was a work of necessity, as other– wi e it would have taken off two or three thousand pounds off the value of my two properties. When at Norwich on the 3rd April I took a dog-cart with Earnshaw, of the L.R.C., to Wroxham, and we had lunch on a bitterly cold reed -bed, and I saw otters for the fir. t time in my life, except the couple I had seen very many years before in the Beverley Brook at Sheen Common. This Easter I railed to Richmond, where Dumpie brought my trike, and rode on to the " White Lion, 11 Cobham.