Excerpt from A Tour Round England, Vol. 1 Glancing down from the golden cross of St. Paul's, the crow cleaves the dim air westward over miles of nursery gardens - lonely plains of rich black earth, lit by a red foggy sun that glows like a red-hot shot. The fruit-tree leaves are brown and crimson above, the little green files of infant lettuces that are growing up for that ravenous monster London, whose hunger is insatiable as that of the Ocean. Edens, with the glory departed, are the gardens of Barnes and Chiswick now - Armada's pleasaunces with the enchantment vanished. Instead of miles of rosy and snowy apple-blossoms, tangles of dead bines and rusted bushes; instead of great yellow gourd flowers, dingy fading and the damp odour of autumn's decay. A little waste of furze, red piles of smoking bricks, a green gleam of meadows under the cold November sunlight, long lines of mossy garden walls, and we are at Brentford - the old British village by the ford of the Thames. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.