t, a corduroy suit, and
a revolver and fifty cartridges from an abandoned pawnbroker's. He
also got some soap and had his first real wash for thirteen months in
a stream outside the town. The Vigilance bands that had at first shot
plunderers very freely were now either entirely dispersed by the plague,
or busy between town and cemetery in a vain attempt to keep pace with
it. He prowled on the outskirts of the town for three or four days,
starving, and then went back to join the Hospital Corps for a week, and
so fortified himself with a few square meals before he started eastward.

The Welsh and English countryside at that time presented the strangest
mingling of the assurance and wealth of the opening twentieth century
with a sort of Dureresque medievalism. All the gear, the houses and
mono-rails, the farm hedges and power cables, the roads and pavements,
the sign-posts and advertisements of the former order were still for the
most part intact. Bankruptcy, social collapse, famine, and pestilence
had done nothing to damage these, and it was only to the great capitals
and ganglionic centres, as it were, of this State, that positive
destruction had come. Any one dropped suddenly into the country would
have noticed very little difference. He would have remarked first,
perhaps, that all the hedges needed clipping, that the roadside grass
grew rank, that the road-tracks were unusually rainworn, and that the
cottages by the wayside seemed in many cases shut up, that a telephone
wire had dropped here, and that a cart stood abandoned by the wayside.
But he would still find his hunger whetted by the bright assurance that
Wilder's Canned Peaches were excellent, or that there was nothing so
good for the breakfast table as Gobble's Sausages. And then suddenly
would come the Dureresque element; the skeleton of a horse, or some
crumpled mass of rags in the ditch, with gaunt extended feet and a
yellow, purple-blotched skin and face, or what had been a face, gaunt
and glaring and devastated. Then here would be a field that had been
ploughed and not sown, and here a field of corn carelessly trampled by
beasts, and here a hoarding torn down across the road to make a fire.

Then presently he would meet a man or a woman, yellow-faced and probably
negligently dressed and armed--prowling for food. These people would
have the complexions and eyes and expressions of tramps or criminals,
and often the clothing of prosperous middle-class or upper