these marvels, tracking the suggestion concealed beneath the words, and
yet glowing like the golden threads in a robe of samite, or like that
device of the old binders by which a vivid picture appeared on the shut
edges of a book. He tried to imitate this art, to summon even the faint
shadow of the great effect, rewriting a page of Hawthorne, experimenting
and changing an epithet here and there, noting how sometimes the
alteration of a trifling word would plunge a whole scene into darkness,
as if one of those blood-red fires had instantly been extinguished.
Sometimes, for severe practice, he attempted to construct short tales
in the manner of this or that master. He sighed over these desperate
attempts, over the clattering pieces of mechanism which would not even
simulate life; but he urged himself to an infinite perseverance. Through
the white hours he worked on amidst the heap and litter of papers; books
and manuscripts overflowed from the bureau to the floor; and if he looked
out he saw the mist still pass by, still passing from the river to the
north.

It was not till the winter was well advanced that he began at all to
explore the region in which he lived. Soon after his arrival in the grey
street he had taken one or two vague walks, hardly noticing where he went
or what he saw; but for all the summer he had shut himself in his room,
beholding nothing but the form and color of words. For his morning walk
he almost invariably chose the one direction, going along the Uxbridge
Road towards Notting Hill, and returning by the same monotonous
thoroughfare. Now, however, when the new year was beginning its dull
days, he began to diverge occasionally to right and left, sometimes
eating his luncheon in odd corners, in the bulging parlors of
eighteenth-century taverns, that still fronted the surging sea of modern
streets, or perhaps in brand new "publics" on the broken borders of the
brickfields, smelling of the clay from which they had swollen. He found
waste by-places behind railway embankments where he could smoke his pipe
sheltered from the wind; sometimes there was a wooden fence by an old
pear-orchard where he sat and gazed at the wet desolation of the
market-gardens, munching a few currant biscuits by way of dinner. As he
went farther afield a sense of immensity slowly grew upon him; it was as
if, from the little island of his room, that one friendly place, he
pushed out into the grey unknown, into a city that for him