Just such a day as Johnny’s London memories always brought, cold and dry and brisk, found him perched on the cart that was to take him to London again.  Besides himself, the cart held his mother and his sister, and the household furniture from the cottage; while Banks, the carrier, sat on the shaft.  Bessy was made comfortable in the armchair; her mother sat on a bundle of bedding, whence it was convenient to descend when steep hills were encountered; and Johnny sat on the tail-board, and jumped off and on as the humour took him.

All through long Loughton village there was something of a triumphal progress, for people knew them, and turned to look.  Bessy alone remained in the cart for the long pull up Buckhurst Hill, while Johnny, tramping beside and making many excursions into the thicket, flung up into her lap sprigs of holly with berries.  Already they had plenty, packed close in a box, but it is better to have too much than too little, so any promising head was added to the store.  For it was December, and Christmas would come in three weeks or so.  And ere p. 70that Nan May was to open shop in London.  It was to be a chandler’s shop, with aspirations toward grocery and butter: chandlery, grocery, and butter being things of the buying and selling whereof Nan May knew as little as anybody in the world, beyond the usual retail prices at the forest villages.  But something must be done, and everything has a beginning somewhere.  So Nan May resolutely set face to the work, to play the world with all the rigour of the game; and her figure, as she tramped sturdily up the hill beside the cart, was visible symbol of her courage.  Always a healthy, clear-skinned, almost a handsome woman, active and shapely, she walked the hill with something of steadfast fierceness, as one joying in trampling an obstacle: her eyes fixed before her, and taking no heed of the view that opened to Bessy’s gaze as she looked back from under the tilt of the cart; but busy with thought of the fight she was beginning, a little fearful, but by so much the gamer.  Meanwhile, it was a good piece of business to decorate a shop with holly at Christmas, and here Johnny found holly ready for the work; it would cost money in London.

The cart crowned the hill-top, and still Nan May regarded not the show that lay behind, whereof Bessy took her fill for the moments still left.  There Loughton tumbled about its green hills, beset with dusky trees, like a spilt boxful of toys, with the sad-coloured forest making the horizon line behind it.  Away to the left, seen p. 71between the boughs of the near pines, High Beach steeple lifted from the velvety edge, and as far to the right, on its own hill, rose the square church tower that stood by gran’dad’s grave.  And where the bold curve of Staples Hill lost itself among the woods, some tall brown trees uprose above the rest and gave good-bye.  For invisible beyond them lay the empty cottage in its patch of garden, grown dank and waste.  Then roadside trees shut all out, and the cart stopped on the level to take up Nan May.

And now the old mare jogged faster along to Woodford Wells and through the Green, fringed with a wonder of big houses, and many broad miles of country seen between them; then, farther, down the easy slope of Rising Sun Road, with thick woods at the way’s edge on each side, their winter austerity softened by the sunlight among the brown twigs.  And so on and on, till they emerged in bushy Leyton Flats, and t............