The privileged man opened the packet, looked in, then, laying it down, went to the window.  His rooms were in the highest flat of a lofty building, and his glance could travel afar beyond the clear panes of glass, as though he were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse.  The slopes of the roofs glistened, the dark broken ridges succeeded each other without end like sombre, uncrested waves, and from the depths of the town under his feet ascended a confused and unceasing mutter.  The spires of churches, numerous, scattered haphazard, uprose like beacons on a maze of shoals without a channel; the driving rain mingled with the falling dusk of a winter’s evening; and the booming of a big clock on a tower, striking the hour, rolled past in voluminous, austere bursts of sound, with a shrill vibrating cry at the core.  He drew the heavy curtains.

The light of his shaded reading-lamp slept like a sheltered pool, his footfalls made no sound on the carpet, his wandering days were over.  No more horizons as boundless as hope, no more twilights within the forests as solemn as temples, in the hot quest for the Ever-undiscovered Country over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave.  The hour was striking!  No more!  No more!—­but the opened packet under the lamp brought back the sounds, the visions, the very savour of the past—­a multitude of fading faces, a tumult of low voices, dying away upon the shores of distant seas under a passionate and unconsoling sunshine.  He sighed and sat down to read.

At first he saw three distinct enclosures.  A good many pages closely blackened and pinned together; a loose square sheet of greyish paper with a few words traced in a handwriting he had never seen before, and an explanatory letter from Marlow.  From this last fell another letter, yellowed by time and frayed on the folds.  He picked it up and, laying it aside, turned to Marlow’s message, ran swiftly over the opening lines, and, checking himself, thereafter read on deliberately, like one approaching with slow feet and alert eyes the glimpse of an undiscovered country.

‘. . .  I don’t suppose you’ve forgotten,’ went on the letter.  ’You alone have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story, though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered his fate.  You prophesied for him the disaster of weariness and of disgust with acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the love sprung from pity and youth.  You had said you knew so well “that kind of thing,” its illusory satisfaction, its unavoidable deception.  You said also—­I call to mind—­that “giving your life up to them” (them meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour) “was like selling your soul to a brute.”  You contended that “that kind of thing” was only endurable and enduring when based on a firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in whose name are established the order, the morality of an ethical progress.  “We want