In later years, though many memories intervene, the Prophet will never forget his journey to the banks of the Mouse. Always it seemed very strange to him and dream-like, that everlasting journey upon the purple ‘bus, complicated by the chatter of the younger scions of the Malkiel dynasty, and by the shrill cries of the conductor summoning the passers-by to hasten to that place of repose consecrated to the worthy and hard-working individuals who drew their modest incomes from the pig. The character of the streets changed as the central districts were left behind, and a curious scent, the scent of Suburbia, seemed to float between the tall chimneys in the morose atmosphere. The purple chariot, which rolled on and on like the chariot of Fate, drew gradually away from the large thoroughfares into mean streets, whose air of dull gentility was for ever autumnal, and the Prophet, on passing some gigantic gasworks, mechanically wondered whether it might not, perhaps, be that monument to whose shadow Malkiel the First had lived and died. Once, looking up at the black sky, he remarked to the little Capricornus that it was evidently going to rain. “No, Mr. Vivian,” replied the boy. “It won’t rain hard this week. January’s a fine month, but there’ll be heavy floods in March, especially along the banks of the Thames.” “And in February there’ll be such a lot of scarlet fever in the southern portions of England,” added the little Corona. “Oh, Corney, just look at that kitty on the airey railings!” “Area, Corona,” corrected her brother. “Oh, my! ain’t it funny?” The Prophet remembered that he was travelling with the scions of a prophetic house. It seemed many years before the ‘bus stopped before a brick building full of quart pots, situated upon a gentle eminence sloping to a coal-yard, and the voice of the conductor proclaimed that the place of repose was reached. The Prophet and his diminutive guides descended from the roof and were shortly in a train puffing between the hunched backs of abominable little houses, sooty as street cats and alive with crying babies. Then bits of waste land appeared, bald wildernesses in which fragments of broken crockery hibernated with old tin cans and kettles yellow as dying leaves. A furtive brown rivulet wandered here and there like a thing endeavouring to conceal itself and unable to find a hiding-place. “That’s the Mouse, Mr. Vivian,” remarked Capricornus, proudly. “We shall soon be there.” “Ridiculum mus,” rejoined his sister, who evidently took after her learned mother. “Culus, Corona; and you’re not to say that. Pater familias says that the Mouse is a noble stream. We get out here, Mr. Vivian.” Here proved to be a wayside station on the very bank of the noble stream, and on the edge of a piece of waste ground so large that it might almost have been called country.