'And I found that when I was once out of the streets just about me that
I knew, some of the queer feeling that had come to me two days before
came back again. It was not nearly so strong, the streets no longer
smelt of incense, but still there was enough of it to show me what a
strange world I passed by. There were things that one may see again and
again in many London streets: a vine or a fig tree on a wall, a lark
singing in a cage, a curious shrub blossoming in a garden, an odd shape
of a roof, or a balcony with an uncommon-looking trellis-work in iron.
There's scarcely a street, perhaps, where you won't see one or other of
such things as these; but that morning they rose to my eyes in a new
light, as if I had on the magic spectacles in the fairy tale, and just
like the man in the fairy tale, I went on and on in the new light. I
remember going through wild land on a high place; there were pools of
water shining in the sun, and great white houses in the middle of dark,
rocking pines, and then on the turn of the height I came to a little
lane that went aside from the main road, a lane that led to a wood, and
in the lane was a little old shadowed house, with a bell turret in the
roof, and a porch of trellis-work all dim and faded into the colour of
the sea; and in the garden there were growing tall, white lilies, just
as we saw them that day we went to look at the old pictures; they were
shining like silver, and they filled the air with their sweet scent. It
was from near that house I saw the valley and high places far away in
the sun. So, as I say, I went "on and on," by woods and fields, till I
came to a little town on the top of a hill, a town full of old houses
bowing to the ground beneath their years, and the morning was so still
that the blue smoke rose up straight into the sky from all the
roof-tops, so still that I heard far down in the valley the song of a
boy who was singing an old song through the streets as he went to
school, and as I passed through the awakening town, beneath the old,
grave houses, the church bells began to ring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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