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Beyond that precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States, I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple. |
This is from They, collected in Traffics and Discoveries. The storyteller, delighjting in the new found freedom of motoring is exploring Sussex, his adoptrd county. He happens on a beautiful old house, which proves to be full of ghosts …… |
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The mustard-coloured scouts of the Automobile Association; their natural enemies, the unjust police; our natural enemies, the deliberate market-day cattle, broadside-on at all corners, the bicycling butcher-boy a furlong behind; road-engines that pulled giddy-go-rounds, rifle galleries, and swings, and sucked snortingly from wayside ponds in defiance of the noticeboard; traction-engines, their trailers piled high with road metal; uniformed village nurses, one per seven statute miles, flitting by on their wheels; governess-carts full of pink children jogging unconcernedly past roaring, brazen touring-cars; |
This is from The Vortex, collected un A Diversity of Creatures. It describes a motor journey with a hilarious conclusion, when bees swarm through a crowded village, stinging everything in their path. |
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since the King’s highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver, the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on cross-roads), |
This is from Steam Tactics, collected in Traffics and Discoveries, another classic of early motoring. The story-teller and two old friends, kidnap a troublesome constable and maroon him in deepest Sussex, among strange beasts. |
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