ridge of blue water-worn
pebbles, and beyond the pebbles at low water is the wet strand over
which she came wading to give the earth children in her own likeness.
The Boy and Miss Muffet beside me are no surprise. They are proper to
the place. The salt water and the sand are still on their brown limbs,
and in the Boy's serious eyes and Miss Muffet's smile there is
something outside my knowledge; but I know that in the depth of that
mystery is security and content.

There is a fear I have, though, when they trip it over the solid and
unquestionable stones, and leave the stones to fly off into the wind
down that shining entrance to the deep. For the strand has no
substance. Their feet move over a void in which far down I see another
sky than ours. They go where I doubt that I can follow. I cannot leave
my hold upon the rocks and enter the place to which their late and
aerial spirits are native. It is plain the earth is not a solid body.
As their bodies, moving over the bright vacuity, grow unsubstantial and
elfin with distance, and they approach that line where the surf
glimmers athwart the radiant void, I have a sudden fear that they may
vanish quite, and only their laughter come at me mockingly from the
near invisible air. They will have gone back to their own place.

VI. The Pit Mouth

There was Great Barr, idle, still, and quiet. Through the Birmingham
suburbs, out into the raw, bleak winter roads between the hedges, quite
beyond the big town smoking with its enterprising labours, one
approached the village of calamity with some awe and diffidence. You
felt you were intruding; that you were a mere gross interloper, coming
through curiosity, that was not excused by the compunction you felt, to
see the appearance of a place that had tragedy in nearly all its homes.
Young men streamed by on bicycles in the same direction, groups were
hurrying there on foot.

The road rose in a mound to let the railway under, and beyond the far
dip was the village, an almost amorphous group of mean red dwellings
stuck on ragged fields about the dominant colliery buildings. Three
high, slim chimneys were leisurely pouring smoke from the grotesque
black skeleton structures above the pits. The road ran by the boundary,
and was packed with people, all gazing absorbed and quiet into the
grounds of the colliery; they were stacked up the hedge banks, and the
walls and trees were loaded with boys.

A few empty motor-cars of the coll