so hovering and humming that the grass's sad, prayerful murmur
seemed charged with a song of life which yet did not hinder reflections
on death. Fluttering above me on noiseless wing were birds the flight
of which sometimes made me start, and stand wondering whether the
object before my gaze was really a bird or not: and everywhere the
shimmer of gilded sunlight was setting the close-packed graveyard in a
quiver which made the mounds of its tombs reminiscent of a sea when,
after a storm, the wind has fallen, and all the green level is an
expanse of smooth, foamless billows.

Beyond the wall of the cemetery the blue void of the firmament was
pierced with smoky chimneys of oil-mills and soap factories, the roofs
of which showed up like particoloured stains against the darker rags
and tatters of other buildings; while blinking in the sunlight I could
discern clatter-emitting, windows which looked to me like watchful
eyes. Only on the nearer side of the wall was a sparse strip of turf
dotted over with ragged, withered, tremulous stems, and beyond this,
again, lay the site of a burnt building which constituted a black patch
of earth-heaps, broken stoves, dull grey ashes, and coal dust. To
heaven gaped the black, noisome mouths of burning-pits wherein the more
economical citizens were accustomed nightly to get rid of the contents
of their dustbins. Among the tall stems of steppe grass waved large,
glossy leaves of ergot; in the sunlight splinters of broken glass
sparkled as though they were laughing; and, from two spots in the dark
brown plot which formed a semicircle around the cemetery, there
projected, like teeth, two buildings the new yellow paint of which
nevertheless made them look mean and petty amid the tangle of rubbish,
pigweed, groundsel, and dock.

Indolently roaming hither and thither, a few speckled hens resembled
female pedlars, and some pompous red cockerels a troupe of firemen; in
the orifices of the burning-pits a number of mournful-eyed, homeless
dogs were lying sheltered; among the shoots of the steppe scrub some
lean cats were stalking sparrows; and a band of children who were
playing hide-and-seek among the orifices above-mentioned presented, a
pitiful sight as they went skipping over the filthy earth, disappearing
in the crevices among the piles of heaped-up dirt.

Beyond the site of the burnt-out building there stretched a series of
mean, close-packed huts which, crammed exclusively with needy folk,