But what immediately followed the gaze of that overwhelming watcher I do not know, for someone touched my arm, and a voice close at my shoulder said in the very tones of an earthly cockney: “What yer starin’ at, guv’nor? Airyplanes? I can’t see none.” I looked at him and found that he was just such a loafer as one may see any day in London. “Aeroplanes,” I repeated. “Great Heaven, can’t you see what’s up there? The procession and that eye?” He stared up then, and I with him, and the eye had gone; but between the still parted heavens I could see into the profundity of a space so rich with beauty and, as it seemed, with promise, that I held my breath in sheer wonder. “No! I can’t see nothin’, guv’nor,” my companion said. And I presume that as he spoke I must have waked from my dream, for the glory vanished and I found myself dispensing a small alms to a shabby man who was representing himself as most unworthily suffering through no fault of his own. As I walked home through the rain I reflected that the people of that incredibly distant world, walking, as they always do, with their gaze bent upon the ground, are probably unable to see the signs and wonders that blaze across the sky. They, like ourselves, are so preoccupied with the miserable importance of their instant lives. THE CAGE I was not asleep. I have watched passengers who kept their eyes shut between the stations, but as yet I have not seen an indisputable case of anyone sound asleep on the Hampstead and Charing Cross Tube. Of the other passages that make up London’s greater intestine I have less experience, and it may be that some tubes are more conducive to slumber than the one most familiar to me. I have no ambition to make a dogmatic generalisation concerning either the stimulative or soporific action of the Underground. I merely wish it to be understood that I was not asleep, and that it was hardly possible that I could have been, with a small portmanteau permanently on one foot, and the owner of it--a little man who must have wished that the straps were rather longer--intermittently on the other. Against this, however, I have to put the fact that I could not say at which station the little man removed from me the burden of himself and his portmanteau. Nor could I give particulars of the appearance of such of my innumerable fellow-passengers as were most nearly presented to me, although I do know that most of them were reading--even the strap-hangers. It was, indeed, this observation that started my vision or train of thought or preoccupation--call it anything you like except a dream. * * * * * The eyes in his otherwise repulsive face held a wistfulness, a hint of vague speculation that attracted me. He sat, hunched on the summit of the steeply rising ground overlooking the sea, the place where the forest comes so abruptly to an end that from a little distance it looks as if it had been gigantically planed to a hard edge.