eader should shorten
the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives. Mrs. Duke,
who had woken up, observed that she was sure it was all very nice,
and the decision was duly noted down by Moses with a blue,
and by Michael with a red pencil. Inglewood then resumed
the reading of the document.

"Then I read the writing of the smoke. Smoke was like the modern
city that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always
wicked and vain.

"Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry
all colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our
weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuse in the sky.
These were the rivers of our vanity pouring into the void.
We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind, and looked down on it,
and seen it as a whirlpool. And then we had used it as a sink.
It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind.
Only our worst things were going to heaven. Only our criminals
could still ascend like angels.

"As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped
by one of the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals
like lamp-posts along that uplifted and aerial highway.
He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was
merely leaning on it, tired with his steep scramble along the terrace.
So far as I could guess from the abysses, full of fog on either side,
and the veiled lights of red brown and old gold glowing through
them now and again, we were on the top of one of those long,
consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are still to be
found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the remains
of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative builders.
Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted
only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old
emptied palaces of Italy. Indeed, some little time later,
when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that we
were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell away
below us into one flat square or wide street below another,
like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in the eccentric
building of London, and looking like the last ledges of the land.
But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.

"My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted
by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky.
Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney
he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more heavil