re, his ancestral consciousness. I
think it was the sight of his wife and the tones of her voice that
suddenly announced to him with the sound of a trumpet that he had
nothing to do with this woman with the Cockney accent, or the pastor who
was coming to supper, or the red brick villa, or Peckham or the City of
London. Though the old place on the banks of the Usk had been sold fifty
years before, still, he was Caradoc of the Garth. I forget how I ended
the story: but here was one of the sources of "A Fragment of Life."_

_And somehow, though the tale was written and printed and paid for; it
stayed with me as a tale half told in the years from 1890 to 1899. I was
in love with the notion: this contrast between the raw London suburb and
its mean limited life and its daily journeys to the City; its utter
banality and lack of significance; between all this and the old, grey
mullioned house under the forest near the river, the armorial bearings
on the Jacobean porch, and noble old traditions: all this captivated me
and I thought of my mistold tale at intervals, while I was writing "The
Great God Pan," "The Red Hand," "The Three Impostors," "The Hill of
Dreams," "The White People," and "Hieroglyphics." It was at the back of
my head, I suppose, all the time, and at last in '99 I began to write
it all over again from a somewhat different standpoint._

_The fact was that one grey Sunday afternoon in the March of that year,
I went for a long walk with a friend. I was living in Gray's Inn in
those days, and we stravaged up Gray's Inn Road on one of those queer,
unscientific explorations of the odd corners of London in which I have
always delighted. I don't think that there was any definite scheme laid
down; but we resisted manifold temptations. For on the right of Gray's
Inn Road is one of the oddest quarters of London--to those, that is,
with the unsealed eyes. Here are streets of 1800-1820 that go down into
a valley--Flora in "Little Dorrit" lived in one of them--and then
crossing King's Cross Road climb very steeply up to heights which always
suggest to me that I am in the hinder and poorer quarter of some big
seaside place, and that there is a fine view of the sea from the attic
windows. This place was once called Spa Fields, and has very properly an
old meeting house of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connection as one of
its attractions. It is one of the parts of London which would attract me
if I wished to hide; not to escape a