d, with great
masses of white cloud in the sky. The house had an outer and an inner
hall, three reception rooms, fine oil-paintings, a kind of museum, and a
large kitchen. In a bed-room above-stairs I found three women with
servants' caps, and a footman, arranged in a strange symmetrical way,
head to head, like rays of a star. As I stood looking at them, I could
have sworn, my good God, that I heard someone coming up the stairs. But
it was some slight creaking of the breeze in the house, augmented a
hundredfold to my inflamed and fevered hearing: for, used for years now
to this silence of Eternity, it is as though I hear all sounds through
an ear-trumpet. I went down, and after eating, and drinking some
clary-water, made of brandy, sugar, cinnamon, and rose water, which I
found in plenty, I lay down on a sofa in the inner hall, and slept a
quiet sleep until near midnight.

I went out then, still possessed with the foolish greed to reach London,
and after getting the engine to rights, went off under a clear black sky
thronged with worlds and far-sown spawn, some of them, I thought,
perhaps like this of mine, whelmed and drowned in oceans of silence,
with one only inhabitant to see it, and hear its silence. And all the
long night I travelled, stopping twice only, once to get the coal from
an engine which had impeded me, and once to drink some water, which I
took care, as always, should be running water. When I felt my head nod,
and my eyes close about 5 A.M., I threw myself, just outside the arch of
a tunnel upon a grassy bank, pretty thick with stalks and flowers, the
workings of early dawn being then in the east: and there, till near
eleven, slept.

On waking, I noticed that the country now seemed more like Surrey than
Kent: there was that regular swell and sinking of the land; but, in
fact, though it must have been either, it looked like neither, for
already all had an aspect of return to a state of wild nature, and I
could see that for a year at the least no hand had tended the soil. Near
before me was a stretch of lucerne of such extraordinary growth, that I
was led during that day and the succeeding one to examine the condition
of vegetation with some minuteness, and nearly everywhere I detected a
certain hypertrophie tendency in stamens, calycles, pericarps, and
pistils, in every sort of bulbiferous growth that I looked at, in the
rushes, above all, the fronds, mosses, lichens, and all cryptogamia, and
in the tre