I turned sharply southward at the edge of this park and presently back to the north-west, past a house of great size with some conservatories, elms, lawns, and water garden--the shadowy and bright grass occupied at that hour by a lap-dog and many swallows. The road, lined on both sides by trees and overhung by valerian and rose-of-Sharon, had an unpleasant sense of privacy meant for others.
The turning eastward out of this road by East Lockinge post office was in line with Ickleton Street, but signs of an exit from the park on the opposite side of the road were obliterated by cottages and gardens. This turning I took, and when it curved decidedly to the right a footpath on the left, between a hedge and some allotment gardens, preserved its original line. This path led westward into a road coming south from Goddard’s Barn. On the right-hand side of the entering of the path into this road lay the good house of West Lockinge Farm, its barn and sheds and lodges gathered about it on one side of the road, and its ricks and elm trees opposite. The road was half farm-yard and half road and littered with straw and husks, where the fowls were stalking and pecking with a laziness that seemed perfectly suited to a Sunday early morning following a blazing harvest Saturday.
I hoped to find a cart track going west from the other side of this road. For about a quarter of a mile I thought I found it raised a little in the stubble. It had been sown and reaped like the rest of the field, but it was a little weedier and grassier. It was making over the swelling arable for Lark Hill and the south edge of Wantage, but I could not find it in the clover nor in the barley beyond that. I therefore turned north into Round Hill, a straight piece of hard road going west into Wantage, with no hedges but grassy borders between it and the arable on either side. This may be the Icknield Way or its successor. It led into the main road at the edge of Wantage, and this I followed into the town. In the first few yards I noticed the sign of the “Lord Nelson” on the left. I recognized it as the work of that venerable artist who designs the faces of guys and turnip-men all over the country. I could tell that the man upon the signboard was Nelson because the uniform corresponded to the name painted below. The face was as much like Nelson as King George III, and it was entirely different from that on the other side of the board. Nevertheless, the effort was to be preferred to a more accurate portrait painted by a builder and decorator’s man from a picture in a history book. It was an effort to represent an image of a hero. The builder and decorator’s man would have aimed simply at reproducing something which impressed him because it was in a printed book: his horses do not represent what he knows or feels about horses, but what he is able to crib from a photographer in a book advertising somebody’s food or embrocation; his “Coach and Horses” is painful to see, because it ought obviously to be in a book. May it be long before he is allowed to molest the shape of the horse or dragon carved into the turf of White Horse Hill. In its present shape it could not be used to advertise horse food or embrocation: but the horse above Alton Priors could be so used and doubtless one day will be.