brown, huge shapes seamed and bursting and
fenestrated with illumination, tattered at a thousand windows with
light and the indistinct, glowing suggestions of feasting and
pleasure. And dim and faint above it all and very remote was the
moon's dead wan face veiled and then displayed.

But we were dashed by an unanticipated refrain to this succession of
magnificent things, and we did not cry, as we had meant to cry, how
good it was to be alive! We found something else, something we had
forgotten.

Along the Embankment, you see, there are iron seats at regular
intervals, seats you cannot lie upon because iron arm-rests prevent
that, and each seat, one saw by the lamplight, was filled with
crouching and drooping figures. Not a vacant place remained, not one
vacant place. These were the homeless, and they had come to sleep
here. Now one noted a poor old woman with a shameful battered straw
hat awry over her drowsing face, now a young clerk staring before him
at despair; now a filthy tramp, and now a bearded, frock-coated,
collarless respectability; I remember particularly one ghastly long
white neck and white face that lopped backward, choked in some
nightmare, awakened, clutched with a bony hand at the bony throat, and
sat up and stared angrily as we passed. The wind had a keen edge that
night even for us who had dined and were well clad. One crumpled
figure coughed and went on coughing--damnably.

"It's fine," said I, trying to keep hold of the effects to which this
line of poor wretches was but the selvage; "it's fine! But I can't
stand _this_."

"It changes all that we expected," admitted my friend, after a
silence.

"Must we go on--past them all?"

"Yes. I think we ought to do that. It's a lesson, perhaps--for trying
to get too much beauty out of life as it is--and forgetting. Don't
shirk it!"

"Great God!" cried I. "But must life always be like this? I could
die--indeed, I would willingly jump into this cold and muddy river
now, if by so doing I could stick a stiff dead hand through all these
things--into the future; a dead commanding hand insisting with a
silent irresistible gesture that this waste and failure of life should
cease, and cease for ever."

"But it does cease! Each year its proportion is a little less."

I walked in silence, and my companion talked by my side.

"We go on. Here is a good thing done, and there is a good thing done.
The Good Will in man----"

"Not fast enough. It goes so slo