tching the bushes shaken by
the wind, and now looking down from a height whence he could see the
dim waves of the town, and a barbaric water tower rising from a hill,
and the snuff-colored cloud of smoke that seemed blown up from the
streets into the sky.

There were certain ways and places that he had cherished; he loved a
great old common that stood on high ground, curtained about with ancient
spacious houses of red brick, and their cedarn gardens. And there was
on the road that led to this common a space of ragged uneven ground with
a pool and a twisted oak, and here he had often stayed in autumn and
looked across the mist and the valley at the great theatre of the sunset,
where a red cloud like a charging knight shone and conquered a purple
dragon shape, and golden lances glittered in a field of faerie green.

Or sometimes, when the unending prospect of trim, monotonous, modern
streets had wearied him, he had found an immense refreshment in the
discovery of a forgotten hamlet, left in a hollow, while all new London
pressed and surged on every side, threatening the rest of the red roofs
with its vulgar growth. These little peaceful houses, huddled together
beneath the shelter of trees, with their bulging leaded windows and
uneven roofs, somehow brought back to him the sense of the country, and
soothed him with the thought of the old farm-houses, white or grey, the
homes of quiet lives, harbors where, perhaps, no tormenting thoughts ever
broke in.

For he had instinctively determined that there was neither rest nor
health in all the arid waste of streets about him. It seemed as if in
those dull rows of dwellings, in the prim new villas, red and white and
staring, there must be a leaven working which transformed all to base
vulgarity. Beneath the dull sad slates, behind the blistered doors, love
turned to squalid intrigue, mirth to drunken clamor, and the mystery of
life became a common thing; religion was sought for in the greasy piety
and flatulent oratory of the Independent chapel, the stuccoed nightmare
of the Doric columns. Nothing fine, nothing rare, nothing exquisite,
it seemed, could exist in the weltering suburban sea, in the habitations
which had risen from the stench and slime of the brickfields. It was as
if the sickening fumes that steamed from the burning bricks had been
sublimed into the shape of houses, and those who lived in these grey
places could also claim kinship with the putrid mud.

Hence he