Silent streets and empty houses had long been familiar to him, but until that day he had not known how swiftly nature, left to herself, could take hold of them. The river and the life that sprang from it was overwhelming what man had deserted. Three winters of neglect in a low-lying, well-watered country had wrought havoc with the work of the farmer and the engineer; streams which had been channelled and guided for centuries had already burst their way back to freedom. With every flooded winter more banks were undermined, more channels silted up and shifted; and that which had been ploughland, copse or water-meadow was relapsing into bog undrained. The valley above and below the town was a green swamp studded with reedy little pools; a refuge for the waterbird where a man would set foot at his peril. Buildings here and there stood rotting, forlorn and inaccessible—barns, sheds and farmhouses, their walls leaning drunkenly as foundations shifted in the mud; and in the town itself, as surely, if more slowly, the waters were taking possession.... Towns had vanished, he knew—vanished so completely that their very sites had been matter of dispute to antiquarians—but never till to-day had he visualized the process; the rising of layer on layer of mud, the sapping of foundations by water. The forces that made ruin and the forces that buried it; flood and frost and the persistent thrust of vegetation. As the waterlogged ground slid beneath them, rows of jerry-built houses were sagging and cracking to their fall; here and there one had crumbled and lay in a rubble heap, the water curdling at its base.... How many life-times, he wondered, till the river had the best of it and the houses where men had gone out and in were one and all of them a rubble heap—under water and mud and rank greenery? He saw them, decades or centuries ahead, as a waste, a stretch of bogland where the river idled; bogland, now flooded, now drying and cracked in the sun; and with broken green islets still thrusting through the swamp—broken green islets of moss-covered rock that underneath was brick and mortar. In time it might be—with more decades or centuries—the islets also would sink lower in the swamp, disappear.... The process, unhindered, was certain as sunrise; the important little streets that humanity had built for its vanished needs and its vanished business would be absorbed into an indifferent wilderness, in all things sufficient to itself. The rigid important little streets had been no more than an episode in the ceaseless life of the wilderness; an episode ending in failure, to be decently buried and forgotten.