foils, clover especially, and some creepers. Many
crop-fields, it was clear, had been prepared, but not sown; some had
not been reaped: and in both cases I was struck with their appearance of
rankness, as I was also when in Norway, and was all the more surprised
that this should be the case at a time when a poison, whose action is
the arrest of oxidation, had traversed the earth; I could only conclude
that its presence in large volumes in the lower strata of the atmosphere
had been more or less temporary, and that the tendency to exuberance
which I observed was due to some principle by which Nature acts with
freer energy and larger scope in the absence of man.

Two yards from the rails I saw, when I got up, a little rill beside a
rotten piece of fence, barely oozing itself onward under masses of foul
and stagnant fungoids: and here there was a sudden splash, and life: and
I caught sight of the hind legs of a diving young frog. I went and lay
on my belly, poring over the clear dulcet little water, and presently
saw two tiny bleaks, or ablets, go gliding low among the swaying
moss-hair of the bottom-rocks, and thought how gladly would I be one of
them, with my home so thatched and shady, and my life drowned in their
wide-eyed reverie. At any rate, these little creatures are alive, the
batrachians also, and, as I found the next day, pupae and chrysales of
one sort or another, for, to my deep emotion, I saw a little white
butterfly staggering in the air over the flower-garden of a rustic
station named Butley.

* * * * *

It was while I was lying there, poring upon that streamlet, that a
thought came into my head: for I said to myself: 'If now I be here
alone, alone, alone... alone, alone... one on the earth... and my girth
have a spread of 25,000 miles... what will happen to my mind? Into what
kind of creature shall I writhe and change? I may live two years so!
What will have happened then? I may live five years--ten! What will have
happened after the five? the ten? I may live twenty, thirty, forty...'

Already, already, there are things that peep and sprout within me...!

* * * * *

I wanted food and fresh running water, and walked from the engine half a
mile through fields of lucerne whose luxuriance quite hid the
foot-paths, and reached my shoulder. After turning the brow of a hill, I
came to a park, passing through which I saw some dead deer and three
p