The room was of the simplest. Against the wall leant the Punch and Judy show, on the mantelpiece was a jar that had once held plum jam and now contained an enormous bundle of wild flowers. Two chairs, a bed, a chest of drawers and a washstand completed the furniture. Against the wall was pinned an enormous outline map of England. This Punch had filled in himself, marking roads, inns, houses, even trees; here and there the names of people were written in a tiny hand. This map was his complete history during the last twenty years; nothing of any importance that had happened to him remained unchronicled. Sometimes it would only be a cross or a line, but he remembered what the sign stood for. The sun struck his nose and rested on his hair, and he awoke. He said “Ugh” and “Ah” very loudly several times, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, raised his arms above his head and yawned, and then sat up. His eyes rested for a moment lovingly on the map. Parts of it were coloured in chalk, red and yellow and blue, for reasons best known to himself. The sight of it opened unending horizons: sharp white roads curving up through the green and brown into a blue misty distance, the round heaving shoulder of some wind-swept down over which he had tramped as the dusk was falling and the stars came slowly from their hiding-places to watch him, the grey mists rising from some deep valley as the sun rose red and angry—they stretched, those roads and hills and valleys, beyond his room and the sea, for ever and ever. And there were people too, in London, in country towns, in lonely farms and tiny villages; the lines and crosses on the map brought to his mind a thousand histories in which he had played his part. He looked at Toby. “A swim, old man,” he said; “time for a swim—out we get!” Toby unrolled himself, rubbed his nose on his mat twice like an Eastern Mahommedan paying his devotions, and strolled across to the bed. His morning greeting to his master was always the same, he rolled his eyes, licked his lips with satisfaction, and wagged an ear; then he looked for a moment quite solemnly into his master’s face with a gaze of the deepest devotion, then finally he leapt upon the bed and curled up at his master’s side. Punch (whose real name, by the way, was David Garrick—I don’t know why I didn’t say so before—he hadn’t the slightest connexion with the actor, because his family didn’t go back beyond his grandfather) stroked a paw and scratched his head. “It’s time we got up and went for a swim, old man. The sun’s been saying so hours ago.” He flung on an overcoat and went out.