I feel sometimes as if I should burst and shatter to bits like a sky-rocket when I think of it. I’ve got such a weal on my arm. “I lost Percival Charles’ ninepence and my nice white cloth out of the basket, and everything, besides having black looks on Thursday because it was mutton chops, which he hates. Oh, Cyril, ‘I wish I was a cassowary, on the banks of the Timbuctoo.’ When I saw Meg sobbing over that lad—thank goodness he wasn’t hurt—! I wished our Georgie was dead; I do now, also; I wish we only had to remember him. I haven’t been to see them lately—can’t stand Meg’s ikeyness. I wonder how it all will end. “There’s P. C. bidding ‘Good night and God Bless You’ to Brother Jakes, and no supper ready——” As soon as I could, after reading Alice’s letter, I went down to Eberwich to see how things were. Memories of the old days came over me again till my heart hungered for its old people. They told me at the “Hollies” that, after a bad attack of delirium tremens, George had been sent to Papplewick in the lonely country to stay with Emily. I borrowed a bicycle to ride the nine miles. The summer had been wet, and everything was late. At the end of September the foliage was heavy green, and the wheat stood dejectedly in stook. I rode through the still sweetness of an autumn morning. The mist was folded blue along the hedges; the elm trees loomed up along the dim walls of the morning, the horse-chestnut trees at hand flickered with a few yellow leaves like bright blossoms. As I rode through the tree tunnel by the church where, on his last night, the keeper had told me his story, I smelled the cold rotting of the leaves of the cloudy summer. I passed silently through the lanes, where the chill grass was weighed down with grey-blue seed-pearls of dew in the shadow, where the wet woollen spider-cloths of autumn were spread as on a loom. Brown birds rustled in flocks like driven leaves before me. I heard the far-off hooting of the “loose-all” at the pits, telling me it was half-past eleven, that the men and boys would be sitting in the narrow darkness of the mines eating their “snap,” while shadowy mice darted for the crumbs, and the boys laughed with red mouths rimmed with grime, as the bold little creatures peeped at them in the dim light of the lamps. The dogwood berries stood jauntily scarlet on the hedge-tops, the bunched scarlet and green berries of the convolvulus and bryony hung amid golden trails, the blackberries dropped ungathered. I rode slowly on, the plants dying around me, the berries leaning their heavy ruddy mouths, and languishing for the birds, the men imprisoned underground below me, the brown birds dashing in haste along the hedges.