he marvel of men and angels.
But I never quite managed to be so absent-minded as that. Some yards at
least from my own door, something vaguely familiar has always caught
my eye; and thus the joke has been spoiled. Of course I have quite
constantly walked into another man's house, thinking it was my own
house; my visits became almost monotonous. But walking into my own house
and thinking it was another man's house is a flight of poetic detachment
still beyond me. Something of the sensations that such an absent-minded
man must feel I really felt the other day; and very pleasant sensations
they were. The best parts of every proper romance are the first chapter
and the last chapter; and to knock at a strange door and find a nice
wife would be to concentrate the beginning and end of all romance.

Mine was a milder and slighter experience, but its thrill was of the
same kind. For I strolled through a place I had imagined quite virgin
and unvisited (as far as I was concerned), and I suddenly found I was
treading in my own footprints, and the footprints were nearly twenty
years old.

It was one of those stretches of country which always suggests an almost
unnatural decay; thickets and heaths that have grown out of what were
once great gardens. Garden flowers still grow there as wild flowers,
as it says in some good poetic couplet which I forget; and there is
something singularly romantic and disastrous about seeing things that
were so long a human property and care fighting for their own hand in
the thicket. One almost expects to find a decayed dog-kennel; with the
dog evolved into a wolf.

This desolate garden-land had been even in my youth scrappily planned
out for building. The half-built or empty houses had appeared quite
threateningly on the edge of this heath even when I walked over it years
ago and almost as a boy. I was astonished that the building had gone
no farther; I suppose somebody went bankrupt and somebody else disliked
building. But I remember, especially along one side of this tangle or
coppice, that there had once been a row of half-built houses. The brick
of which they were built was a sort of plain pink; everything else was a
blinding white; the houses smoked with white dust and white sawdust;
and on many of the windows were rubbed those round rough disks of white
which always delighted me as a child. They looked like the white eyes of
some blind giant.

I could see the crude, parched pink-and-white vil