Sporting notions of present days and past

CHAPTER XI
PUTNEY AND THE CLUBS
MY old and very much valued friend and corre-
spondent Mr W. H. Eyre, has been propounding
an idea that should be taken up by the State.
He wants—as I want, and many of us have
wanted for a long while—somebody at his own
expense, or at the municipality's or the country-at-
large's, to collect all interesting material about the
houses we live in before memories of occurrences
and folk-lore worth recording die out. Once I
got so far as inducing two or three biggish men
to favourably consider a little thing of my own—
via., systematic photographing at intervals of all
streets, squares, houses of importance or peculiar
construction any way interesting. The scheme
was to take their portraits before they were
rearranged by pulling down and rebuilding, or
merely reduced to ruins. " Ruins " happens to
be the word right here, for it was through getting
himself up in
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1 all black " so as to fit in with latter-
day picturesque ideas of the New Zealanders'
touring costume, and sitting in memory (and, let
me repeat, the other adornments) moralising on
the
Ruins of London up Holborn Hill way, that
Mr Eyre came to suggest and request that some
competent person should undertake picturesque
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