d so, with many
good wishes from his father, he came to the retreat in the waste places
of London.

He was in high spirits when he found the square, clean room, horribly
furnished, in the by-street that branched from the main road, and
advanced in an unlovely sweep to the mud pits and the desolation that
was neither town nor country. On every side monotonous grey streets, each
house the replica of its neighbor, to the east an unexplored wilderness,
north and west and south the brickfields and market-gardens, everywhere
the ruins of the country, the tracks where sweet lanes had been,
gangrened stumps of trees, the relics of hedges, here and there an oak
stripped of its bark, white and haggard and leprous, like a corpse. And
the air seemed always grey, and the smoke from the brickfields was grey.

At first he scarcely realized the quarter into which chance had led him.
His only thought was of the great adventure of letters in which he
proposed to engage, and his first glance round his "bed-sitting-room"
showed him that there was no piece of furniture suitable for his purpose.
The table, like the rest of the suite, was of bird's-eye maple; but the
maker seemed to have penetrated the druidic secret of the rocking-stone,
the thing was in a state of unstable equilibrium perpetually. For some
days he wandered through the streets, inspecting the second-hand
furniture shops, and at last, in a forlorn byway, found an old Japanese
bureau, dishonored and forlorn, standing amongst rusty bedsteads, sorry
china, and all the refuse of homes dead and desolate. The bureau pleased
him in spite of its grime and grease and dirt. Inlaid mother-of-pearl,
the gleam of lacquer dragons in red gold, and hints of curious design
shone through the film of neglect and ill-usage, and when the woman of
the shop showed him the drawers and well and pigeon-holes, he saw that
it would be an apt instrument for his studies.

The bureau was carried to his room and replaced the "bird's-eye" table
under the gas-jet. As Lucian arranged what papers he had accumulated: the
sketches of hopeless experiments, shreds and tatters of stories begun
but never completed, outlines of plots, two or three notebooks scribbled
through and through with impressions of the abandoned hills, he felt a
thrill of exaltation at the prospect of work to be accomplished, of a
new world all open before him.

He set out on the adventure with a fury of enthusiasm; his last thought
at nig