And then I saw, floating across the shimmering roadway, a few downy seeds. They came from the direction of the Thames. They swung in the motion of the street-air, and the light glistened on their filaments. One drifted to the pavement at my feet, and released a curved brown seed. By its size I knew it to be that of the Yellow Goatsbeard, or John-go-to-bed-at-noon. Immediately the bus-rattle, the whirr of cab-wheels, and the burnt-oil smell sank away. The seed bloomed in the palm of my hand, and I saw its flowers of pure yellow, and a whitethroat was slipping through the nettles of the ditch. The city was old, but the brown seed was older. Men raised their buildings anew after the great fire, hundreds of years ago; the flower did not change. My mind reached back before the time of the Romans with their tiled baths and chariots; further still, when the first wild settlers made their hut circles by the marge of the wooded river. All the while the dandelion had been blooming so that the seed should be formed. No haste, no strife, no misery: growing in the sunlight. A lovely disk of gold, a summer day, a wandering bee, and the mother-beauty became the child-seed. And this common speck, coming with the moving air to my feet, was as old as the spirit that manifests itself through dull matter in a million million forms and ways. I dropped the seed and went away, no longer stifled by the weary monotony of my useless work. Then I thought that I would like to keep it, and plant it in some known corner in order to watch its increasing joy as the plant grew in spring, and to take to myself some of its happiness. I searched on the pavement, but it was so small and commonplace I could not see it. A passerby asked if he might help me: had I lost anything and was it of any value--a gold ring, perhaps? I replied in my enthusiasm that it was of more value than a gold ring, hoping (as ever the dreamer has) that he would share my wonder of this seed in London. He was interested and puzzled, so I told him it was the seed of a sort of dandelion that I sought. He stared at me as though I had said that God was in the Strand, and had just spoken to me; and then he turned away with a smile. THE CHANGE: _A Fantasy of Whitefoot Lane_ (_To J. R._) He was standing at the edge of the strip of wood, quite still, and looking towards the east as though at something far away. No wind was blowing. As I approached he did not move, although my feet made a sighing in the long grass. Abruptly he turned. “When I was last here, the field swept away, open and free, for many miles. In summer, the wheat grew yellow in the sunshine. Now the houses are nearly to the wood, and the little piece of land left is turned into allotments. But even those are deserted, for they are going to build shortly.”