a citadel.  I did not know the town, except by passings-through, and was surprised at the breadth of view.  Between me and the Castle to the east lay the district of crowding houses, brick and ragstone, mixed in the distance with vague azure haze; and to the right the harbour, the sea, with their ships; and visible around me on the heights seven or eight dead, biting the dust; the sun now high and warm, with hardly a cloud in the sky; and yonder a mist, which was the coast of France.

It seemed too big for one poor man.

My head nodded.  I sat on a bench, black-painted and hard, the seat and back of horizontal boards, with intervals; and as I looked, I nodded, heavy-headed and weary:  for it was too big for me.  And as I nodded, with forehead propped on my left hand, and the packet of pemmican cakes in my right, there was in my head, somehow, an old street-song of my childhood:  and I groaned it sleepily, like coronachs and drear funereal nenias, dirging; and the packet beat time in my right hand, falling and raising, falling heavily and rising, in time.

I’ll buy the ring, You’ll rear the kids:  Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting. . . . . . . . . . .  Ting, ting, Won’t we be happy?  Ting, ting, That shall be it:  I’ll buy the ring, You’ll rear the kids:  Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting. . . . . . . . . . .

So maundering, I fell forward upon my face, and for twenty-three hours, the living undistinguished from the dead, I slept there.

* * * * *

I was awakened by drizzle, leapt up, looked at a silver chronometer which, attached by a leather to my belt, I carried in my breeches-pocket, and saw that it was 10 A.M.  The sky was dark, and a moaning wind—­almost a new thing now to me—­had arisen.

I ate some pemmican, for I had a reluctance—­needless as it turned out—­to touch any of the thousand luxuries here, sufficient no doubt, in a town like Dover alone, to last me five or six hundred years, if I could live so long; and, having eaten, I descended The Shaft, and spent the whole day, though it rained and blustered continually, in wandering about.  Reasoning, in my numb way, from the number of ships on the sea, I expected to find the town over-crowded with dead:  but this was not so; and I should say, at a venture, that not a thousand English, nor fifteen thousand foreigners, were in it:  for that westward rage and stampede must have operated here also, leaving the town empty but for the ever new-coming hosts.

The first thing which I did was to go into an open grocer’s shop, which was also a post and telegraph office, with the notion, I suppose, to get a message through to London.  In the shop a single gas-light was burning its last, and this, with that near the pier, were the only two that I saw:  and ghastly enough they looked, transparently wannish, and as it were ashamed, like blinking night-things overtaken