Sheaves by E.F. Benson — Read

Mannington, like most old-fashioned English towns, is built in a wood-sheltered hollow, and screened from the inclemencies of northern and easterly winds by the big chalk towns of Wiltshire. Before the days of railways and the decentralisation of local centres that followed, it had been a county town of some importance, but situated as it was only on a branch line of the Great Western, the mercantile and manufacturing life, never very vigorous, was sucked out of it into Swindon, and for the last fifty years or more it had been a place of singular sedateness and most leisurely life.

In olden times the "county" and local gentry used to foregather there in considerable numbers for Christmas festivities, such as county and hunt balls, and the town is full of charming old red-brick residences, now for the most part let to wealthy and retired tradesfolk, or less wealthy but equally retired colonels and captains of the services, who, surrounded by their wives and families, live a very quiet and pleasant existence, warding off the gout which port and advancing years threaten them with by golf or gentle horse exercise on the downs. To the south and west the country is flat and open, the line of downs holding the town itself as if the base of the fingers of some huge grass-clad hand, while across the palm of it below, following, so to speak, the "line of heart," the Kennet makes a loitering half-circle before wandering on again through its low-lying water-meadows, starred with red ragged-robin and the burnished gold of the marsh marigolds, to join the Thames at Reading.