This morning I felt incontrollably disgusted with everything; could literally do nothing, not even summon energy to go into London; when Emma started the bright idea that we should go to St. Alban’s. As soon as dinner over we started on foot for Colney Hatch station.... The rail only goes to Hatfield, we found; but there, got a ride on the top of the ’bus here, in the most lovely weather--Emma in a state of buoyant enjoyment. We should have thought more of the fields, no doubt, were we not so much used to them of late. However, one field of turnips against the afternoon sky did surprise us into exclamation, with its wonderful emerald tints. And then we passed a strange sight; two tall chimneys standing separately in a small space of ground (about a rod, I suppose); the rest covered with black-looking rubbish, some of it smoking, some children looking at it. This, the day before, had been a house, the home of a young couple married some three months, the man a wheelwright. Fire surprised them in bed the previous night, it would seem, and they had to escape as they were, in their bed-clothes. And here lay all that they possessed, flattened down into black ashes. I broke a tooth a day or two ago, and the gap seemed for some days hard to reconcile with my impressions of what forms ought to surround my tongue. If so it is with the remains of a decayed tooth, the gap caused by the loss of all one has must be harder still to realize at first. However, they are young, and no life was lost; and, as the man is not an artist, there is yet hope of prosperity in store for them. And now we are at the _Peahen_, and Emma has just gone to bed, and I am writing God knows to what purpose (but vanity). And we have spent six shillings getting here, which is sheer madness in the present state of our prospects; besides one bob wasted on a description of the Abbey--certainly the silliest little book that fool ever penned, the most complete do that ever I was subjected to; fifty pages of the most complete vacuity that ever small-country-town-bred numbskull, without a shade of learning, ingenuity, or imagination, could possibly have put into circulation. And now to bed. Not even one line of the Battles of St. Alban’s!