he house: for I would not touch the young mother to remove her. And
finding on Machen's desk a big note-book with soft covers, dappled red
and yellow, not yet written in, I took it, and a pencil, and in the
little turret-nook wrote day after day for hours this account of what
has happened, nearly as far as it has now gone. And I think that I may
continue to write it, for I find in it a strange consolation, and
companionship.

* * * * *

In the Severn Valley, somewhere in the plain between Gloucester and
Cheltenham, in a rather lonely spot, I at that time travelling on a
tricycle-motor, I spied a curious erection, and went to it. I found it
of considerable size, perhaps fifty feet square, and thirty high, made
of pressed bricks, the perfectly flat roof, too, of brick, and not one
window, and only one door: this door, which I found open, was rimmed all
round its slanting rims with india-rubber, and when closed must have
been perfectly air-tight. Just inside I came upon fifteen English people
of the dressed class, except two, who were evidently bricklayers: six
ladies, and nine men: and at the further end, two more, men, who had
their throats cut; along one wall, from end to end were provisions; and
I saw a chest full of mixed potassic chlorate and black oxide of
manganese, with an apparatus for heating it, and producing oxygen--a
foolish thing, for additional oxygen could not alter the quantity of
breathed carbonic anhydride, which is a direct narcotic poison. Whether
the two with cut throats had sacrificed themselves for the others when
breathing difficulties commenced, or been killed by the others, was not
clear. When they could bear it no longer, they must have finally opened
the door, hoping that by then, after the passage of many days perhaps,
the outer air would be harmless, and so met their death. I believe that
this erection must have been run up by their own hands under the
direction of the two bricklayers, for they could not, I suppose, have
got workmen, except on the condition of the workmen's admission: on
which condition they would naturally employ as few as possible.

In general, I remarked that the rich must have been more urgent and
earnest in seeking escape than the others: for the poor realised only
the near and visible, lived in to-day, and cherished the always-false
notion that to-morrow would be just like to-day. In an out-patients'
waiting-room, for instance, in the G