saw that driving among them would be
impracticable, whereas the street which I had taken during the night
was fairly clear. I thought a minute what I should do: then went by a
parallel back-street, and came out to a shop in the Strand, where I
hoped to find all the information which I needed about the excavations
of the country. The shutters were up, and I did not wish to make any
noise among these people, though the morning was bright, it being about
ten o'clock, and it was easy to effect entrance, for I saw a crow-bar in
a big covered furniture-van near. I, therefore, went northward, till I
came to the British Museum, the cataloguing-system of which I knew well,
and passed in. There was no one at the library-door to bid me stop, and
in the great round reading-room not a soul, except one old man with a
bag of goitre hung at his neck, and spectacles, he lying up a
book-ladder near the shelves, a 'reader' to the last. I got to the
printed catalogues, and for an hour was upstairs among the dim sacred
galleries of this still place, and at the sight of certain Greek and
Coptic papyri, charters, seals, had such a dream of this ancient earth,
my good God, as even an angel's pen could not half express on paper.
Afterwards, I went away loaded with a good hundred-weight of
Ordnance-maps, which I had stuffed into a bag found in the cloak-room,
with three topographical books; I then, at an instrument-maker's in
Holborn, got a sextant and theodolite, and at a grocer's near the river
put into a sack-bag provisions to last me a week or two; at Blackfriars
Bridge wharf-station I found a little sharp white steamer of a few tons,
which happily was driven by liquid air, so that I had no troublesome
fire to light: and by noon I was cutting my solitary way up the Thames,
which flowed as before the ancient Britons were born, and saw it, and
built mud-huts there amid the primaeval forest; and afterwards the
Romans came, and saw it, and called it Tamesis, or Thamesis.

* * * * *

That night, as I lay asleep on the cabin-cushions of my little boat
under the lee of an island at Richmond, I had a clear dream, in which
something, or someone, came to me, and asked me a question: for it said:
'Why do you go seeking another man?--that you may fall upon him, and
kiss him? or that you may fall upon him, and murder him?' And I answered
sullenly in my dream: 'I would not murder him. I do not wish to murder
anyone.'