It seems that the stranger’s name was Gerald Jones, and he always lived in London; but once as a child he had been on a Northern moor.  It was so long ago that he did not remember how, only somehow or other he walked alone on the moor, and all the ling was in flower.  There was nothing in sight but ling and heather and bracken, except, far off near the sunset, on indistinct hills, there were little vague patches that looked like the fields of men.  With evening a mist crept up and hid the hills, and still he went walking on over the moor.  And then he came to the valley, a tiny valley in the midst of the moor, whose sides were incredibly steep.  He lay down and looked at it through the roots of the ling.  And a long, long way below him, in a garden by a cottage, with hollyhocks all round her that were taller than herself, there sat an old woman on a wooden chair, singing in the evening.  And the man had taken a fancy to the song and remembered it after in London, and whenever it came to his mind it made him think of evenings—­the kind you don’t get in London—­and he heard a soft wind going idly over the moor and the bumble-bees in a hurry, and forgot the noise of the traffic.  And always, whenever he heard men speak of Time, he grudged to Time most this song.  Once afterwards he went to that Northern moor again and found the tiny valley, but there was no old woman in the garden, and no one was singing a song.  And either regret for the song that the old woman had sung, on a summer evening twenty years away and daily receding, troubled his mind, or else the wearisome work that he did in London, for he worked for a great firm that was perfectly useless; and he grew old early, as men do in cities.  And at last, when melancholy brought only regret and the uselessness of his work gained round him with age, he decided to consult a magician.  So to a magician he went and told him his troubles, and particularly he told him how he had heard the song.  “And now,” he said, “it is nowhere in the world.”

“Of course it is not in the world,” the magician said, “but over the Edge of the World you may easily find it.”  And he told the man that he was suffering from flux of time and recommended a day at the Edge of the World.  Jones asked what part of the Edge of the World he should go to, and the magician had heard Tong Tong Tarrup well spoken of; so he paid him, as is usual, in opals, and started at once on the journey.  The ways to that town are winding; he took the ticket at Victoria Station that they only give if they know you:  he went past Bleth:  he went along the Hills of Neol-Hungar and came to the Gap of Poy.  All these are in that part of the world that pertains to the fields we know; but beyond the Gap of Poy on those ordinary plains, that so closely resemble Sussex, one first meets the unlikely.  A line of common grey hills, the Hills of Sneg, may be seen at the edge of the plain from the Gap of Poy; it is there that the incredible begins, infrequently at first, but happening more