ious of being a
creature of mystery. He pitied the fettered youth of these begrimed and
joyless towns--slaves, Men with Muckrakes (he had fished up ail old
"Pilgrim's Progress" from the lower depths of the van), who obstinately
refused to raise their eyes to the glorious sun in heaven. In his
childish arrogance he would ask Barney Bill, "Why don't they go away
and leave it, like me?" And the wizened little man would reply, with
the flicker of an eyelid unperceived by Paul, "Because they haven't no
'igh-born parents waiting for 'em. They're born to their low estate,
and they knows it." Which to Paul was a solution of peculiar comfort.

Even the blackened lands between the towns had their charm for Paul, in
that he had a gleeful sense of being excluded from the wrath of God,
which fell continuously upon them and the inhabitants thereof. And here
and there a belt of leafy country gave promise, or confirmed Barney
Bill's promise, of the Paradise that would come. Besides, what mattered
the perpetuations of Bludston brickfields when the Land of Beulah
shimmered ahead in the blue distance, when "Martin Chuzzlewit" lay open
on his knees, when the smell of the bit of steak sizzling on the
cooking stove stung his young blood? And now they were in Warwickshire,
county of verdant undulations and deep woods and embowered villages.
Every promise that Barney Bill had made to him of beauty was in process
of fulfilment. There were no more blighted towns, no more factories, no
more chimneys belching forth smoke. This was the Earth, the real
broad-bosomed Mother Earth. What he had left was the Hell upon Earth.
What he was going to might be Paradise, but Paul's imagination rightly
boggled at the conception of a Paradise more perfect. And, as Paul's
prescient wit had conjectured, he was learning many things; the names
of trees and wild flowers, the cries of birds, the habits of wayside
beasts; what was good for a horse to eat and what was bad; which was
the Waggon, and Orion's Belt and the Bunch of Keys in the heavens; how
to fry bacon and sew up rents in his clothing; how to deal with his
fellow-man, or, rather, with his fellow-woman, in a persuasive manner;
how to snare a rabbit or a pheasant and convert it into food, and how,
at the same time, to evade the terrors of the law; the differences
between wheat and oats and barley; the main lines of cleavage between
political parties, hitherto a puzzle to Paul, for Barney Bill was a
politician