went about making preparations for the Gargantuan orgy of the night.

* * * * *

The house at Hampstead, which no doubt still stands, is of rather
pleasing design in quite a stone and rural style, with good breadths of
wall-surface, two plain coped gables, mullioned windows, and oversailing
slate verge roofs, but, rather spoiling it, a high square three-storied
tower at the south-east angle, on the topmost floor of which I had slept
the previous night. There I had provided myself with a jar of pale
tobacco mixed with rose-leaves and opium, found in a foreign house in
Seymour Street, also a genuine Saloniki hookah, together with the best
wines, nuts, and so on, and a gold harp of the musician Krasinski,
stamped with his name, taken from his house in Portland Street.

But so much did I find to do that day, and so many odd things turned up
which I thought that I would take with me, that it was not till near six
that I drove finally northward through Camden Town. And now an ineffable
awe possessed my soul at the solemn noise which everywhere encompassed
me, an ineffable awe, a blissful terror. Never, never could I have
dreamed of aught so great and potent. All above my head there rushed
southward with wide-spread wing of haste a sparkling smoke; and mixed
with the immense roaring I heard mysterious hubbubs of tumblings and
rumblings, which I could not at all comprehend, like the moving-about of
furniture in the houses of Titans; while pervading all the air was a
most weird and tearful sound, as it were threnody, and a wild wail of
pain, and dying swan-songs, and all lamentations and tribulations of the
world. Yet I was aware that, at an hour so early, the flames must be far
from general; in fact, they had not well commenced.

* * * * *

As I had left a good semicircular region of houses, with a radius of
four hundred yards, without combustibles to the south of the isolated
house which I was to occupy, and as the wind was so strongly from the
north, I simply left my two vehicles at the door of the house, without
fear of any injury: nor did any occur. I then went up to the top of the
tower, lit the candles, and ate voraciously of the dinner which I had
left ready, for since the morning I had taken nothing; and then, with
hands and heart that quivered, I arranged the clothes of the low
spring-bed upon which to throw my frame in the morning hours. Opposite
the