* * * * *

It was while I was lying there, poring upon that streamlet, that a thought came into my head:  for I said to myself:  ’If now I be here alone, alone, alone... alone, alone... one on the earth... and my girth have a spread of 25,000 miles... what will happen to my mind?  Into what kind of creature shall I writhe and change?  I may live two years so!  What will have happened then?  I may live five years—­ten!  What will have happened after the five? the ten?  I may live twenty, thirty, forty...’

Already, already, there are things that peep and sprout within me...!

* * * * *

I wanted food and fresh running water, and walked from the engine half a mile through fields of lucerne whose luxuriance quite hid the foot-paths, and reached my shoulder.  After turning the brow of a hill, I came to a park, passing through which I saw some dead deer and three persons, and emerged upon a terraced lawn, at the end of which stood an Early English house of pale brick with copings, plinths, stringcourses of limestone, and spandrels of carved marble; and some distance from the porch a long table, or series of tables, in the open air, still spread with cloths that were like shrouds after a month of burial; and the table had old foods on it, and some lamps; and all around it, and all on the lawn, were dead peasants.  I seemed to know the house, probably from some print which I may have seen, but I could not make out the escutcheon, though I saw from its simplicity that it must be very ancient.  Right across the facade spread still some of the letters in evergreens of the motto:  ‘Many happy returns of the day,’ so that someone must have come of age, or something, for inside all was gala, and it was clear that these people had defied a fate which they, of course, foreknew.  I went nearly throughout the whole spacious place of thick-carpeted halls, marbles, and famous oils, antlers and arras, and gilt saloons, and placid large bed-chambers:  and it took me an hour.  There were here not less than a hundred and eighty people.  In the first of a vista of three large reception-rooms lay what could only have been a number of quadrille parties, for to the coup d’oeil they presented a two-and-two appearance, made very repulsive by their jewels and evening-dress.  I had to steel my heart to go through this house, for I did not know if these people were looking at me as soon as my back was turned.  Once I was on the very point of flying, for I was going up the great central stairway, and there came a pelt of dead leaves against a window-pane in a corridor just above on the first floor, which thrilled me to the inmost soul.  But I thought that if I once fled, they would all be at me from behind, and I should be gibbering mad long, long before I reached the outer hall, and so stood my ground, even defiantly advancing.  In a small dark bedroom in the north wing on the second