Weymouth, a hamlet, was then the suburb of Melcombe Regis, a city and port.  Now Melcombe Regis is a parish of Weymouth.  The village has absorbed the city.  It was the bridge which did the work.  Bridges are strange vehicles of suction, which inhale the population, and sometimes swell one river-bank at the expense of its opposite neighbour.

The boy went to the bridge, which at that period was a covered timber structure.  He crossed it.  Thanks to its roofing, there was no snow on the planks.  His bare feet had a moment’s comfort as they crossed them.  Having passed over the bridge, he was in Melcombe Regis.  There were fewer wooden houses than stone ones there.  He was no longer in the village; he was in the city.

The bridge opened on a rather fine street called St. Thomas’s Street.  He entered it.  Here and there were high carved gables and shop-fronts.  He set to knocking at the doors again:  he had no strength left to call or shout.

At Melcombe Regis, as at Weymouth, no one was stirring.  The doors were all carefully double-locked, The windows were covered by their shutters, as the eyes by their lids.  Every precaution had been taken to avoid being roused by disagreeable surprises.  The little wanderer was suffering the indefinable depression made by a sleeping town.  Its silence, as of a paralyzed ants’ nest, makes the head swim.  All its lethargies mingle their nightmares, its slumbers are a crowd, and from its human bodies lying prone there arises a vapour of dreams.  Sleep has gloomy associates beyond this life:  the decomposed thoughts of the sleepers float above them in a mist which is both of death and of life, and combine with the possible, which has also, perhaps, the power of thought, as it floats in space.  Hence arise entanglements.  Dreams, those clouds, interpose their folds and their transparencies over that star, the mind.  Above those closed eyelids, where vision has taken the place of sight, a sepulchral disintegration of outlines and appearances dilates itself into impalpability.  Mysterious, diffused existences amalgamate themselves with life on that border of death, which sleep is.  Those larvae and souls mingle in the air.  Even he who sleeps not feels a medium press upon him full of sinister life.  The surrounding chimera, in which he suspects a reality, impedes him.  The waking man, wending his way amidst the sleep phantoms of others, unconsciously pushes back passing shadows, has, or imagines that he has, a vague fear of adverse contact with the invisible, and feels at every moment the obscure pressure of a hostile encounter which immediately dissolves.  There is something of the effect of a forest in the nocturnal diffusion of dreams.

This is what is called being afraid without reason.

What a man feels a child feels still more.

The uneasiness of nocturnal fear, increased by the spectral houses, increased the weight of the sad burden under which he was struggling.