Somewhere in Nutshire there is a place called Cotterham.  It is one of those little villages which somehow nobody expects to meet nowadays outside the pages of a KATE GREENAWAY painting book.  There is the village green, with its pond and geese and absurdly pretty cottages with gardens full of red bergamot and lads’-love, and a little school where the children are still taught to curtsey and pull their forelocks when the Squire goes by.  And beyond the Green, at the end of Plough Lane and after you have crossed Leg-o’-Mutton Common, you come to Down Wood, and if you don’t meet Little Red Riding-Hood on the way or come on Snow White and her seven dwarfs, that is only because you must have taken the wrong turning after you came through the kissing-gate at the bottom of Lovers’ Lane.  I am a native of Cotterham, and in my more reflective moments I wonder why such an idyllic place should have produced anything so unromantic as myself, His Majesty’s Deputy Assistant Acting Inspector for All Sorts of Unexpected Explosives.  Cotterham still has a large place in my affections, and it gave me a considerable shock the other day to get a letter from the Squire, who is an old friend, asking me down for a week-end, and adding, “You can do a little professional job for me too.  You really will be interested to see what splendid work is being done here in your line of fire.  The output is some of the best in the district.  But there has been trouble lately and the leaders of the two biggest shifts were found to have appropriated a substantial part of the output to their own uses.  I shall rely on you to straighten things out and suggest the right penalties.”

So they were even making munitions in Cotterham.  I conjured up visions of interminable rows of huts, of thousands of overalled workers swamping Plough Lane, trampling the Green brown, scaring the geese, obliterating the immemorial shape of Leg-o’-Mutton Common by a mushroom township, laying Down Wood low, and coming to me with some miserable tale of petty pilfering for my adjustment.  I must own I got out of the train at Muddlehampstead and into the station fly feeling distinctly low-spirited.  It was some consolation to find that the railway still stopped seven miles short of my village, though I reflected gloomily that the place itself was doubtless a network of light railways by this time.  We bowled along in stately fashion up Plough Lane and past Halfpenny Cross to the Manor House with its thatched roof and Virginia-creeper all over the porch.  The Squire carried me off at once for the professional part of my visit, but we fell to talking of fishing, which had been good, and cubbing, which had been bad, and were on to Leg-o’-Mutton Common before I remembered to speak of munitions.

“Not much sign of war here,” I said with a relieved sigh.  “I was afraid they’d have spoilt the dear old heath for a certainty.  Only don’t say it’s Down Wood they’ve gone to, for that’d be more than I could stand.  I thought there were fairies there long after I ought to have been a hard-headed young man of six, and if they’ve gone and desecrated that wood with factories—­”