y
with my tray. At the bottom of the stairs I could see through the garden
door the sky grown sulphur and the bushes glowing, while all the panes
of glass turned incandescent.

Then the explosion came; it sounded as though it was just behind the
hospital. Two hundred panes of glass fell out, and they made a noise
too.

Standing in the dark with a tray in my hand I heard a man's voice saying
gleefully, "I haven't been out of bed this two months!"

Some one lit a candle, and by its light I saw all the charwomen from the
kitchen bending about like broken weeds, and every officer was saying,
"There, there now!"

We watched the fires till midnight from the hill.

I went over this morning early. We were thirty-two in a
carriage--Lascars, Chinese, children, Jews, niggers from the docks.

Lascars and children and Jews and I, we fought to get off the station
platform; sometimes there wasn't room on the ground for both my feet at
once.

The fires were still burning and smouldering there at midday, but a
shower of rime fell on it, so that it looked like an old ruin, something
done long ago.

At Pompeii, some one told me, one looked into the rooms and they were as
they had been left--tables laid.... Here, too, I saw a table laid for
the evening meal with a bedstead fallen from the upper floor astraddle
across it. The insides of the houses were coughed into their windows,
basket-chairs hanging to the sills, and fire-irons.

Outside, the soil of the earth turned up; a workman's tin mug stuck and
roasted and hardened into what looks like solid rock--a fossil, as
though it had been there for ever.

London is only skin-deep. Beneath lies the body of the world.

The hump under the blankets rolls over and a man's solemn face appears
upon the pillow.

"Can you get me a book, nurse?"

"Yes. What kind do you like?"

"Nothing fanciful; something that might be true."

"All right!"

"Oh--and nurse...?"

"Yes?"

"Not sentimental and not funny, I like a practical story."

I got him "Lord Jim."...

Another voice: "Nurse, is there any modern French poetry in that
bookcase?"

"Good heavens, no! Who would have brought it here?"

(Who are they all ... these men with their differing tastes?)

Perhaps the angels feel like this as they trail about in heaven with
their wings flapping on their thin white legs....

"Who were you, angel?"

"I was a beggar outside San Marco."

"Were you? How odd! I was an Englishman."