with a comet. It would only throw things back. It would
only make what was left of life more savage than it is at present."

"But why should ANYTHING be left of life?" said I. . . .

That was our style, you know, and meanwhile we walked together up
the narrow street outside his lodging, up the stepway and the lanes
toward Clayton Crest and the high road.

But my memories carry me back so effectually to those days before
the Change that I forget that now all these places have been altered
beyond recognition, that the narrow street and the stepway and the
view from Clayton Crest, and indeed all the world in which I was
born and bred and made, has vanished clean away, out of space and
out of time, and wellnigh out of the imagination of all those who
are younger by a generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see,
the dark empty way between the mean houses, the dark empty way
lit by a bleary gas-lamp at the corner, you cannot feel the hard
checkered pavement under your boots, you cannot mark the dimly lit
windows here and there, and the shadows upon the ugly and often
patched and crooked blinds of the people cooped within. Nor can you
presently pass the beerhouse with its brighter gas and its queer,
screening windows, nor get a whiff of foul air and foul language
from its door, nor see the crumpled furtive figure--some rascal
child--that slinks past us down the steps.

We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomiting
smoke and sparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which one
saw the greasy brilliance of shop fronts and the naphtha flares of
hawkers' barrows dripping fire into the night. A hazy movement of
people swayed along that road, and we heard the voice of an itinerant
preacher from a waste place between the houses. You cannot see these
things as I can see them, nor can you figure--unless you know the
pictures that great artist Hyde has left the world--the effect of
the great hoarding by which we passed, lit below by a gas-lamp and
towering up to a sudden sharp black edge against the pallid sky.

Those hoardings! They were the brightest colored things in all
that vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers of paste and
paper, all the rough enterprises of that time joined in chromatic
discord; pill vendors and preachers, theaters and charities,
marvelous soaps and astonishing pickles, typewriting machines and
sewing machines, mingled in a sort of visualized clamor. And passing
that the