ed down the street on the left-hand side, took
the first turning to the left and the third to the right, from where I
bought an evening paper, followed the road on the right-hand side round
two obtuse angles, and came out just outside a Metropolitan station,
where I took a train home. For forty years two months and four days I
fulfilled this course by accumulated habit: it was not a long street
that I traversed, and it took me about four and a half minutes to do it.
After forty years two months and four days, on the fifth day I went out
in the same manner, with my umbrella in the right hand and my bag in the
left, and I began to notice that walking along the familiar street tired
me somewhat more than usual; and when I turned it I was convinced that I
had turned down the wrong one. For now the street shot up quite a steep
slant, such as one only sees in the hilly parts of London, and in this
part there were no hills at all. Yet it was not the wrong street; the
name written on it was the same; the shuttered shops were the same; the
lamp-posts and the whole look of the perspective was the same; only
it was tilted upwards like a lid. Forgetting any trouble about
breathlessness or fatigue I ran furiously forward, and reached the
second of my accustomed turnings, which ought to bring me almost within
sight of the station. And as I turned that corner I nearly fell on the
pavement. For now the street went up straight in front of my face like a
steep staircase or the side of a pyramid. There was not for miles round
that place so much as a slope like that of Ludgate Hill. And this was
a slope like that of the Matterhorn. The whole street had lifted itself
like a single wave, and yet every speck and detail of it was the same,
and I saw in the high distance, as at the top of an Alpine pass, picked
out in pink letters the name over my paper shop.

"I ran on and on blindly now, passing all the shops and coming to a part
of the road where there was a long grey row of private houses. I had,
I know not why, an irrational feeling that I was a long iron bridge in
empty space. An impulse seized me, and I pulled up the iron trap of a
coal-hole. Looking down through it I saw empty space and the stairs.

"When I looked up again a man was standing in his front garden, having
apparently come out of his house; he was leaning over the railings and
gazing at me. We were all alone on that nightmare road; his face was in
shadow; his dress was dark