rrest, perhaps, but rather to escape
the possibility of ever meeting anybody who had ever seen me before._

_But: my friend and I resisted it all. We strolled along to the parting
of many ways at King's Cross Station, and struck boldly up Pentonville.
Again: on our left was Barnsbury, which is like Africa. In Barnsbury
semper aliquid novi, but our course was laid for us by some occult
influence, and we came to Islington and chose the right hand side of the
way. So far, we were tolerably in the region of the known, since every
year there is the great Cattle Show at Islington, and many men go there.
But, trending to the right, we got into Canonbury, of which there are
only Travellers' Tales. Now and then, perhaps, as one sits about the
winter fire, while the storm howls without and the snow falls fast, the
silent man in the corner has told how he had a great aunt who lived in
Canonbury in 1860; so in the fourteenth century you might meet men who
had talked with those who had been in Cathay and had seen the splendours
of the Grand Cham. Such is Canonbury; I hardly dare speak of its dim
squares, of the deep, leafy back-gardens behind the houses, running down
into obscure alleyways with discreet, mysterious postern doors: as I
say, "Travellers' Tales"; things not much credited._

_But, he who adventures in London has a foretaste of infinity. There is
a region beyond Ultima Thule. I know not how it was, but on this famous
Sunday afternoon, my friend and I, passing through Canonbury came into
something called the Balls Pond Road--Mr. Perch, the messenger of Dombey
& Son, lived somewhere in this region--and so I think by Dalston down
into Hackney where caravans, or trams, or, as I think you say in
America, trolley cars set out at stated intervals to the limits of the
western world._

_But in the course of that walk which had become an exploration of the
unknown, I had seen two common things which had made a profound
impression upon me. One of these things was a street, the other a small
family party. The street was somewhere in that vague, uncharted, Balls
Pond-Dalston region. It was a long street and a grey street. Each house
was exactly like every other house. Each house had a basement, the sort
of story which house-agents have grown to call of late a "lower ground
floor." The front windows of these basements were half above the patch
of black, soot-smeared soil and coarse grass that named itself a garden,
and so, passing a