'Well, after I had walked a bit further, that queer sort of feeling
seemed to fade away. I said a bit further, and I really thought I had
been walking about five minutes, but I had looked at my watch just
before I got into that little street, and when I looked at it again it
was eleven o'clock. I must have done about eight miles. I could scarcely
believe my own eyes, and I thought my watch must have gone mad; but I
found out afterwards it was perfectly right. I couldn't make it out, and
I can't now; I assure you the time passed as if I walked up one side of
Edna Road and down the other. But there I was, right in the open
country, with a cool wind blowing on me from a wood, and the air full of
soft rustling sounds, and notes of birds from the bushes, and the
singing noise of a little brook that ran under the road. I was standing
on the bridge when I took out my watch and struck a wax light to see the
time; and it came upon me suddenly what a strange evening it had been.
It was all so different, you see, to what I had been doing all my life,
particularly for the year before, and it almost seemed as if I couldn't
be the man who had been going into the City every day in the morning and
coming back from it every evening after writing a lot of uninteresting
letters. It was like being pitched all of a sudden from one world into
another. Well, I found my way back somehow or other, and as I went along
I made up my mind how I'd spend my holiday. I said to myself, "I'll have
a walking tour as well as Ferrars, only mine is to be a tour of London
and its environs," and I had got it all settled when I let myself into
the house about four o'clock in the morning, and the sun was shining,
and the street almost as still as the wood at midnight!'
'I think that was a capital idea of yours. Did you have your tour? Did
you buy a map of London?'
'I had the tour all right. I didn't buy a map; that would have spoilt
it, somehow; to see everything plotted out, and named, and measured.
What I wanted was to feel that I was going where nobody had been before.
That's nonsense, isn't it? as if there could be any such places in
London, or England either, for the matter of that.'
'I know what you mean; you wanted to feel as if you were going on a sort
of voyage of discovery. Isn't that it?'
'Exactly, that's what I was trying to tell you. Besides, I didn't want
to buy a map. I made a map.'
'How do you mean? Did you make a map out of your head?'
'I'll tell you about it afterwards. But do you really want to hear about
my grand tour?'
'Of course I do; it must have been delightful. I call it a most original
idea.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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