"Well, good-bye and good luck, sonny."
Soon I reached the gateway, trailing my heavy suitcase ... heavy mostly with manuscripts....
A woodland path led me into what seemed, and was, a veritable forest; boughs interlaced above, with glimpses of blue sky between. In interspaces of trees wild flowers grew. Luxuriant summer was abroad.
I stepped out of the forest straightway into the community. It was in a beautiful open space like a natural meadow.
There stood the houses of the colonists—Single Taxers, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists,—folk of every shade of radical opinion ... who here strove to escape the galling mockeries of civilisation and win back again to pastoral simplicity.
It was a community such as William Morris or some Guild Socialist of a medieval turn of mind might have conceived. It was the Dream of John Ball visualised.
"When Adam dolve and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?"
Toy houses picturesquely set under trees that fringed the Common ... houses with different, quaint colours ... the "green" in the centre carefully cropped as if nibbled by sheep ... well-kept paths of parti-coloured stone, as if each pebble had been placed there by hand....
Everything here was born obviously of the Arts and Crafts movement, a movement which seeks to teach that each shall make and build for himself ... if clumsily, yet uniquely ... the product to be something at least individual and warm from the maker's personality.