If you should follow the fence along for a short distance you might even now soon forget the factory and imagine yourself to be far away in some remote village corner, surrounded with fresh green foliage and drinking in the sweet breath of the open fields. One would not conceive that in the very factory grounds, within sight of the hot, smoky workshops, and but a stone’s throw from some of them, it would be possible to enjoy the charm of rusticity, and to revel unseen in a profusion of flowers that would be sought for in vain in many parts about the countryside. Yet such is the pleasure to be derived from a visit to this little frequented spot. The fence, to the end, runs parallel with the recreation ground alongside a hedgerow that once parted the two fields when the whole was in the occupation of the people at the old farmhouse that has now disappeared. In the hedgerow, with their trunks close against the board partition, still in their prime and in strong contrast to the black smoky walls and roofs of the sheds opposite, stand half-a-dozen stately elms that stretch their huge limbs far over the yard and throw a deep shadow on the ground beneath. At this spot the field gradually declines and, as the inner yard has been made up to a level with the railway beyond, when you approach the angle you find yourself out of sight, with the raised platform of cinders on the one hand and, on the other, the high wooden fence and thick elms.
At the corner the steel tracks have had to make a long curve, and this has left the ground there free to bring forth whatever it will. Here, also, the trees are thickest, and, within the fence, a small portion of the original site still remains. A streamlet--perhaps the last drain of a once considerable brook--enters from the recreation ground underneath the boards and is conducted along, now within its natural banks and now through broken iron pipes, into the corner, where it is finally swallowed up in a gully and lost to view. Stooping over it, as though to protect it from further injury and insult, are several clumps of hawthorn and the remains of an old hedge of wych elm. Standing on the railway track of the bank are some frames of carriages that were burnt out at the recent big fire. Near them are several crazy old waggons and vans, that look as if they had stood in the same place for half a century and add still further to the quiet of the scene.
