A woman who lived in the country watched and waited for the approach of the city. She was convinced it would come directly from the North, and only in the afternoon. So she scanned the northern horizon through binoculars until tea-time. Her expectations and her anxieties, however fearful, always ceased absolutely at four o'clock.
The speculators grew wise and parked their lorries to the East of her property and unloaded their bricks on the western and southern sides of her garden whilst she was pouring the tea.
When the city was built in the woods and fields around the woman's house, the town-planners had left the woman an open corridor to the North. But at four o'clock every afternoon they confidently filled that corridor in with temporary buildings and disposable traffic.