e
ticket-collector, closing the aperture with a snap, and making for the
door. And I have never forgotten the hoarse voice of the old clerk
with an acid edge to it as he clinked his three coppers, saying
"Return, Sodom."

***

It is an amazing thing how within the circuit of the same parish,
removed by one mile from one another, there can live together two eras
so remote from each other in the order of human development, as the
world of the red-roofed houses on the slopes of the hills, and the
village at their base where the gorge, worn by the little river through
the travail of immemorial centuries, debouches on the great central
plain that runs across Scotland.

Every morning the dwellers on the slopes are borne by the railway on a
great span of arches over the little village, and they look down on the
roofs of its houses. On the slopes there lies the world in which the
fringes of life are embroidered--a world where men and women talk of
books, pictures and plays. It is a world of hyphenated names. But in
all the village there is not so much as one hyphenated name. It is a
refuse-heap of humanity. Many diverse races are crowded in it. The
city fathers clean out slums without providing first for the
slum-dwellers, and, swept before the broom of so-called social
reformers, homeless men and women have drifted to the village, and
there reconstituted their slum.

From the glens of the north broken Highlanders, driven out to make room
for sheep, have drifted hither to work in the quarries, and the speech
of their children's children still bears the trace of their ancient
language pure and clean; over the sea Irishmen have come to reap the
harvest fields of the Lothians, and they have been deposited by the
tide in the village. Stray Poles have come hither and straggling
Czechs; a man from Connemara neighbours a shaggy giant from Lewis; and
a dour stone-cutter from Aberdeen is door by door with an Italian who
sells what looks like a deadly mixture from a hand-cart.

Here you can see humanity in its primitive state, before it began to
adorn the fringes of life, and make for itself sanctuaries of privacy.
Between the slopes and the base of the hill there yawns an invisible
chasm. Centuries separate them. Thus it comes that the slope-dweller
passes on the top of the arches, scanning his newspaper, without so
much as seeing the huddle of houses which constitute the village.

It is only a week ago that, like the