las still; though I had
not thought at all of them for a quarter of my life; and had not thought
much of them even when I saw them. Then I was an idle, but eager youth
walking out from London; now I was a most reluctantly busy middle-aged
person, coming in from the country. Youth, I think, seems farther off
than childhood, for it made itself more of a secret. Like a prenatal
picture, distant, tiny, and quite distinct, I saw this heath on which I
stood; and I looked around for the string of bright, half-baked villas.
They still stood there; but they were quite russet and weather-stained,
as if they had stood for centuries.

I remembered exactly what I had done on that day long ago. I had half
slid on a miry descent; it was still there; a little lower I had knocked
off the top of a thistle; the thistles had not been discouraged, but
were still growing. I recalled it because I had wondered why one knocks
off the tops of thistles; and then I had thought of Tarquin; and then I
had recited most of Macaulay's VIRGINIA to myself, for I was young. And
then I came to a tattered edge where the very tuft had whitened with
the sawdust and brick-dust from the new row of houses; and two or three
green stars of dock and thistle grew spasmodically about the blinding
road.

I remembered how I had walked up this new one-sided street all those
years ago; and I remembered what I had thought. I thought that this
red and white glaring terrace at noon was really more creepy and more
lonesome than a glimmering churchyard at midnight. The churchyard could
only be full of the ghosts of the dead; but these houses were full of
the ghosts of the unborn. And a man can never find a home in the future
as he can find it in the past. I was always fascinated by that mediaeval
notion of erecting a rudely carpentered stage in the street, and acting
on it a miracle play of the Holy Family or the Last Judgment. And I
thought to myself that each of these glaring, gaping, new jerry-built
boxes was indeed a rickety stage erected for the acting of a real
miracle play; that human family that is almost the holy one, and that
human death that is near to the last judgment.

For some foolish reason the last house but one in that imperfect row
especially haunted me with its hollow grin and empty window-eyes.
Something in the shape of this brick-and-mortar skeleton was attractive;
and there being no workmen about, I strolled into it for curiosity and
solitude. I gave