THE BUS AND THE PEDESTRIAN.
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Extraordinary Developments in the Habits of Country Folk,
OONLY one of my Collection of Ordnance maps is black and white, but I have made so many 'red lines on this map that it is beginning to look like a fully coloured edition. The red lines have been made to show the roads I have explored, and they stretch in all directions out of the Yorkshire town where .I have spent much of my time in reeent years. I have not attempted to measure the distance these red lines cover, but I like to notice that they make quite a good display on the right-hand side of the map. To set it down thus gives me a certain feeling of satisfaction and, more than that, helps me to remember things I have seen in this industrial district, which seemed so strange to me a few years ago.
Recently I came upon a piece of landscape in a colliery district which would hold its own with many another in unspoiled pastoral country, yet a pithead was near enough to he seen out of the corner of my eye. Just before this I saw the queerest stile (if it can be called a stile) I. have ever seen. It consisted of four ledges so built into a wall that one could walk up them to the footpath which began at the top of the wall. (I do not think it would be possible for a fat man to perform this feat.) On the same walk I saw a farmhouse which, according to a stone over the door, was built in 1725. The girl in the farmyard previcied an interesting, contrast to the figures over the door. There she was, dressed according to the present mode and with shingled hair, carrying the new milk into the house. Successive daughters of that house have been doing the same thing for 200 years, yet none but the present one was spoiled for choice as to which. of three towns she should wend her way that evening. Now you may hail the bus from this 1725 doorway and in half an hour be laughing at the capers of a comedian who has never left America. • Consider how transport has influenced this change. Illustrated newspapers, brought by inotorvan, tell members of the farmer's family what they must wear this
season if they do not wish to appear out of date. Films, which the villagers have travelled by bus to see, have :themselves been' delivered by a motor vehicle which has collected the others and carried them on; and but for the bus which took me part of the way I could not have reached this farm in the time I had to spare. That brings me back to the map.
Wherever there is a continuous red line it means that I have gone over that road. on foot. I wish it were possible, however, to show the stages in which this scattered area has been covered. At the beginning I simply walked out and home again: then, as the immediate district became familiar to me, I used the bus to get farther afield. Already I bare travelled past the old farm and then walked to the next village, where old and new are in a mixture stranger still. There one-half of a house is dated 1694, the other half 1909, and if you shut the few new houses out of your eye you could imagine yourself back in the seventeenth century. Now, from this old-world place there are regular services to Barnsley, Dewsbury, Wakefield and Huddersfield; the last-named had a special interest when I was last there, for buses were taking drama lovers from all these .villages to 'see the well-known Shakespearean company which was playing there.
Even this I shall probably remember whenever I get the map out and see the name of that village. Patient exploration is as richly rewarded in this as in any part of the country. You may walk through colliery villages so drab of themselves that they have a drab effect upon the mind, and five minutes later be held up by a view which makes you forget that you ever saw a pithead ; and the reason is that you are in country which lies on the edge of the coalfield.
Buses will take you farther into the industrial field or right away from it. so that if you live in a factory • town and have a shilling or two in yoUr pocket you may go to the old village and hear its news. You may possibly have the same luck there as I did, for I Saw a young, frisking fold.