Read it through once

Continuing, she compares the old romantic structures in which our ancestors delighted—now, unhappily, nearly all demolished—with, what she calls, the handsome and uniform buildings which are now the fashion; and she remarks on the rapid growth which the town was then making, “having recently been extended to nearly double its former size.” What would she have said, we wonder, could she have foreseen the Reading of to-day with its palatial polished-granite-fronted business emporiums controlled from the Metropolis by great limited liability companies whose insatiable appetites are devouring, as their policy of grab is choking, the life from the old-time burgesses; burgesses who gloried in their town and whom their town took pleasure in honouring; men whose places are now filled by battalions of shopmen whose fixity of tenure is so doubtful as to preclude them from taking any part or interest, however slight, in the town which shelters them? And, in regard to the extension which she names with so much pride, how she would gasp with astonishment had she been told that Whitley, from which she viewed the pleasant scene, would be turned into dreary streets of uniformly built villas, never deviating by so much as half a brick from the monotony of the usual “desirable residence”; that the old limits of the town, beyond which she could easily descry the panoramic revel of field and meadow, would be extended for nearly two miles each way, almost indeed to her beloved “Our Village,” and that the population of 16,000—each unit placidly pursuing its fairly prosperous calling—would be transformed, seventy years later, into a struggling, perspiring, more or less harassed army of 88,000, the majority not daring, though they would not admit the stern impeachment, to call their bodies their own.