CHAPTER I.A NEW NEIGHBORHOOD, AND A STRANGE CHARACTER.
At the period when the episode just related occurred in the life of Mr.
Zachary Thorpe the younger--that is to say, in the year 1837--Baregrove Square was the farthest square from the city, and the nearest to the country, of any then existing in the north-western suburb of London.
But, by the time fourteen years more had elapsed--that is to say, in the year 1851--Baregrove Square had lost its distinctive character altogether; other squares had filched from it those last remnants of healthy rustic flavor from which its good name had been derived; other streets, crescents, rows, and villa-residences had forced themselves pitilessly between the old suburb and the country, and had suspended for ever the once neighborly relations between the pavement of Baregrove Square and the pathways of the pleasant fields.
Alexander's armies were great makers of conquests; and Napoleon's armies were great makers of conquests; but the modern Guerilla regiments of the hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln, are the greatest conquerors of all; for they hold the longest the soil that they have once possessed.

How mighty the devastation which follows in the wake of these tremendous aggressors, as they march through the kingdom of nature, triumphantly bricklaying beauty wherever they go! What dismantled castle, with the enemy's flag flying over its crumbling walls, ever looked so utterly forlorn as a poor field-fortress of nature, imprisoned on all sides by the walled camp of the enemy, and degraded by a hostile banner of pole and board, with the conqueror's device inscribed on it--"THIS GROUND TO BE LET ON BUILDING LEASES ?" What is the historical spectacle of Marius sitting among the ruins of Carthage, but a trumpery theatrical set-scene, compared with the mournful modern sight of the last tree left standing, on the last few feet of grass left growing, amid the greenly-festering stucco of a finished Paradise Row, or the naked scaffolding poles of a half-completed Prospect Place?
Oh, gritty-natured Guerilla regiments of the hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln! the town-pilgrim of nature, when he wanders out at fall of day into the domains which you have spared for a little while, hears strange things said of you in secret, as he duteously interprets the old, primeval language of the leaves; as he listens to the death-doomed trees, still whispering mournfully around him the last notes of their ancient even-song! But what avails the voice of lamentation?
What new neighborhood ever stopped on its way into the country, to hearken to the passive remonstrance of the fields, or to bow to the indignation of outraged admirers of the picturesque?
Never was suburb more impervious to any faint influences of this sort, than that especial suburb which grew up between Baregrove Square and the country; removing a walk among the hedge-rows a mile off from the resident families, with a ruthless rapidity at which sufferers on all sides stared aghast.

First stories were built, and mortgaged by the enterprising proprietors to get money enough to go on with the second; old speculators failed and were succeeded by new; foundations sank from bad digging; walls were blown down in high winds from hasty building; bricks were called for in such quantities, and seized on in such haste, half-baked from the kilns, that they set the carts on fire, and had to be cooled in pails of water before they could be erected into walls--and still the new suburb defied all accidents, and grew irrepressibly into a little town of houses, ready to be let and lived in, from the one end to the other.
The new neighborhood offered house-accommodation--accepted at the higher prices as yet only to a small extent--to three distinct subdivisions of the great middle class of our British population.

Rents and premises were adapted, in a steeply descending scale, to the means of the middle classes with large incomes, of the middle classes with moderate incomes, and of the middle classes with small incomes.

The abodes for the large incomes were called "mansions," and were fortified strongly against the rest of the suburb by being all built in one wide row, shut in at either end by ornamental gates, and called a "park." The unspeakable desolation of aspect common to the whole suburb, was in a high state of perfection in this part of it.