sea, with their ships; and
visible around me on the heights seven or eight dead, biting the dust;
the sun now high and warm, with hardly a cloud in the sky; and yonder a
mist, which was the coast of France.

It seemed too big for one poor man.

My head nodded. I sat on a bench, black-painted and hard, the seat and
back of horizontal boards, with intervals; and as I looked, I nodded,
heavy-headed and weary: for it was too big for me. And as I nodded, with
forehead propped on my left hand, and the packet of pemmican cakes in my
right, there was in my head, somehow, an old street-song of my
childhood: and I groaned it sleepily, like coronachs and drear funereal
nenias, dirging; and the packet beat time in my right hand, falling and
raising, falling heavily and rising, in time.

I'll buy the ring,
You'll rear the kids:
Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting.
. . . . .
. . . . .
Ting, ting,
Won't we be happy?
Ting, ting,
That shall be it:
I'll buy the ring,
You'll rear the kids:
Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting.
. . . . .
. . . . .

So maundering, I fell forward upon my face, and for twenty-three hours,
the living undistinguished from the dead, I slept there.

* * * * *

I was awakened by drizzle, leapt up, looked at a silver chronometer
which, attached by a leather to my belt, I carried in my
breeches-pocket, and saw that it was 10 A.M. The sky was dark, and a
moaning wind--almost a new thing now to me--had arisen.

I ate some pemmican, for I had a reluctance--needless as it turned
out--to touch any of the thousand luxuries here, sufficient no doubt,
in a town like Dover alone, to last me five or six hundred years, if I
could live so long; and, having eaten, I descended The Shaft, and spent
the whole day, though it rained and blustered continually, in wandering
about. Reasoning, in my numb way, from the number of ships on the sea, I
expected to find the town over-crowded with dead: but this was not so;
and I should say, at a venture, that not a thousand English, nor fifteen
thousand foreigners, were in it: for that westward rage and stampede
must have operated here also, leaving the town empty but for the ever
new-coming hosts.

The first thing which I did was to go into an open grocer's shop, which
was also a post and telegraph office, with the notion, I suppose, to get
a messa