the bulk and quality
of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down, our
toil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, in
those early years.

But these were the coarse material bases of the Phoenix fires
of the world. These were but the outward and visible signs of the
innumerable claims, rights, adhesions, debts, bills, deeds, and
charters that were cast upon the fires; a vast accumulation of
insignia and uniforms neither curious enough nor beautiful enough
to preserve, went to swell the blaze, and all (saving a few truly
glorious trophies and memories) of our symbols, our apparatus and
material of war. Then innumerable triumphs of our old, bastard,
half-commercial, fine-art were presently condemned, great oil
paintings, done to please the half-educated middle-class, glared
for a moment and were gone, Academy marbles crumbled to useful lime,
a gross multitude of silly statuettes and decorative crockery, and
hangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and musical instruments
shared this fate. And books, countless books, too, and bales
of newspapers went also to these pyres. From the private houses
in Swathinglea alone--which I had deemed, perhaps not unjustly,
altogether illiterate--we gathered a whole dust-cart full of cheap
ill-printed editions of the minor English classics--for the most
part very dull stuff indeed and still clean--and about a truckload
of thumbed and dog-eared penny fiction, watery base stuff, the
dropsy of our nation's mind. . . . And it seemed to me that when
we gathered those books and papers together, we gathered together
something more than print and paper, we gathered warped and
crippled ideas and contagious base suggestions, the formulae of dull
tolerances and stupid impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities
of sluggish habits of thinking and timid and indolent evasions.
There was more than a touch of malignant satisfaction for me in
helping gather it all together.

I was so busy, I say, with my share in this dustman's work that
I did not notice, as I should otherwise have done, the little
indications of change in my mother's state. Indeed, I thought her
a little stronger; she was slightly flushed, slightly more talkative. . . .

On Beltane Eve, and our Lowchester rummage being finished, I went
along the valley to the far end of Swathinglea to help sort the
stock of the detached group of potbanks there--their chief output
had been mantel ornaments in imitatio