Two tramps come and fling themselves by me as I eat my noonday meal. The one, red-eyed, furtive, lies on his side with restless, clutching hands that tear and twist and torture the living grass, while his lips mutter incoherently. The other sits stooped, bare-footed, legs wide apart, his face grey, almost as grey as his stubbly beard; and it is not long since Death looked him in the eyes. He tells me querulously of a two hundred miles tramp since early spring, of search for work, casual jobs with more kicks than halfpence, and a brief but blissful sojourn in a hospital bed, from which he was dismissed with sentence passed upon him. For himself, he is determined to die on the road under a hedge, where a man can see and breathe. His anxiety is all for his fellow; _he_ has said he will "do for a man"; he wants to "swing," to get out of his "dog's life." I watch him as he lies, this Ishmael and would-be Lamech. Ignorance, hunger, terror, the exhaustion of past generations, have done their work. The man is mad, and would kill his fellow-man. Presently we part, and the two go, dogged and footsore, down the road which is to lead them into the great silence. III YESTERDAY was a day of encounters. First, early in the morning, a young girl came down the road on a bicycle. Her dressguard was loose, and she stopped to ask for a piece of string. When I had tied it for her she looked at me, at my worn dusty clothes and burnt face; and then she took a Niphetos rose from her belt and laid it shyly in my dirty disfigured palm. I bared my head, and stood hat in hand looking after her as she rode away up the hill. Then I took my treasure and put it in a nest of cool dewy grass under the hedge. _Ecce ancilla Domini._ My next visitor was a fellow-worker on his way to a job at the cross-roads. He stood gazing meditatively at my heap of stones. "'Ow long 'ave yer bin at this job that y'ere in such a hurry?" I stayed my hammer to answer--"Four months." "Seen better days?" "Never," I said emphatically, and punctuated the remark with a stone split neatly in four. The man surveyed me in silence for a moment; then he said slowly, "Mean ter say yer like crackin' these blamed stones to fill 'oles some other fool's made?" I nodded. "Well, that beats everything. Now, I '_ave_ seen better days; worked in a big brewery over near Maidstone--a town that, and something doing; and now, 'ere I am, 'ammering me 'eart out on these blasted stones for a bit o' bread and a pipe o' baccy once a week--it ain't good enough." He pulled a blackened clay from his pocket and began slowly filling it with rank tobacco; then he lit it carefully behind his battered hat, put the spent match back in his pocket, rose to his feet, hitched his braces, and, with a silent nod to me, went on to his job.