ers of the Wey and Mole and Wandle ran in rectangular
channels; and wherever a gentle elevation of the ground permitted a
fountain of deodorised sewage distributed its benefits athwart the land
and made a rainbow of the sunlight.

By a great archway in that enormous city wall emerged the Eadhamite road
to Portsmouth, swarming in the morning sunshine with an enormous traffic
bearing the blue-clad servants of the Food Company to their toil. A
rushing traffic, beside which they seemed two scarce-moving dots. Along
the outer tracks hummed and rattled the tardy little old-fashioned
motors of such as had duties within twenty miles or so of the city; the
inner ways were filled with vaster mechanisms--swift monocycles bearing
a score of men, lank multicycles, quadricycles sagging with heavy loads,
empty gigantic produce carts that would come back again filled before
the sun was setting, all with throbbing engines and noiseless wheels and
a perpetual wild melody of horns and gongs.

Along the very verge of the outermost way our young people went in
silence, newly wed and oddly shy of one another's company. Many were the
things shouted to them as they tramped along, for in 2100 a
foot-passenger on an English road was almost as strange a sight as a
motor car would have been in 1800. But they went on with steadfast eyes
into the country, paying no heed to such cries.

Before them in the south rose the Downs, blue at first, and as they came
nearer changing to green, surmounted by the row of gigantic wind-wheels
that supplemented the wind-wheels upon the roof-spaces of the city, and
broken and restless with the long morning shadows of those whirling
vanes. By midday they had come so near that they could see here and
there little patches of pallid dots--the sheep the Meat Department of
the Food Company owned. In another hour they had passed the clay and the
root crops and the single fence that hedged them in, and the prohibition
against trespass no longer held: the levelled roadway plunged into a
cutting with all its traffic, and they could leave it and walk over the
greensward and up the open hillside.

Never had these children of the latter days been together in such a
lonely place.

They were both very hungry and footsore--for walking was a rare
exercise--and presently they sat down on the weedless, close-cropped
grass, and looked back for the first time at the city from which they
had come, shining wide and splendid in the bl