e march. I
remember it as one remembers an unusual dream, a vague blur behind the
sharper memories that intervene.

"And out of the mists of impressions came the fact that we were going to
this toy town in the middle distance to visit Pollyni's uncle, a
gentleman who had been to America also, and having dug trenches for
drains and conduits in New York City for a year or two, had returned and
bought the principal cafe in the village. There was a moment when the
place lost the qualities of a water-colour painting and began to assume
the aspects of reality, when the homogeneous colouring of the land
became broken up into tobacco fields and vineyards and vegetable
patches, with an occasional pony walking round a mediaeval contraption
which brought minute buckets of water up from a well and trickled them
into a wooden sluice. And these in turn gave place to a sketchy and
winding earthen road which twisted among shabby houses with forlorn
sheds in which tobacco leaves hung drying on poles, and fowls pecked in
a disillusioned fashion while they meditated upon the formidable problem
of existence. And then we passed houses standing aloof and forbidding,
shut up, apparently uninhabited, houses which had quite simply tumbled
down for lack of support, houses with the front door upstairs, and
houses without any doors at all as far as one could see. We passed them
and our driver cracked his whip with great energy, the horses stumbled
against big stones or into rain gullies, an occasional human stared
woodenly at us; and suddenly we came round an intricate curve of the
street and we were in the little square of the village, a square
canopied by an immense tree and overhanging eaves. In the centre stood a
worn old well-curb where bare-legged girls fished up dripping petroleum
cans and staggered across to open doors, most of the water running
unregarded through a hole in the bottom. If you could call it a square,
when it had six or seven irregular sides, with the streets running into
it in a furtively tangential fashion and the corners of it cool and dark
even at noon-tide under that patriarchal tree which had been planted by
a patriarch, no doubt, while he was digging the well. This was the end
of our journey, where we got out, and the carriage rumbled away into the
green gloom beyond to some convenient stable, while we were welcomed by
a gentleman with a soft voice and very loud western clothing like that
affected by race-track folk,