re was a muddy lane of cinders, a lane without a light,
that used its many puddles to borrow a star or so from the sky. We
splashed along unheeding as we talked.

Then across the allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-looking
sheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road.
The high road ascended in a curve past a few houses and a beerhouse
or so, and round until all the valley in which four industrial
towns lay crowded and confluent was overlooked.

I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weird
magnificence over all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The
horrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that were
homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of
unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-stave
and wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where
the iron ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the
blast furnaces were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust
from foundry, pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilated
by the night. The dust-laden atmosphere that was gray oppression
through the day became at sundown a mystery of deep translucent
colors, of blues and purples, of somber and vivid reds, of strange
bright clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the darkling sky.
Each upstart furnace, when its monarch sun had gone, crowned itself
with flames, the dark cinder heaps began to glow with quivering
fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in a volcanic coronet of
light. The empire of the day broke into a thousand feudal baronies
of burning coal. The minor streets across the valley picked themselves
out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that brightened and mingled at
all the principal squares and crossings with the greenish pallor of
incandescent mantles and the high cold glare of the electric arc.
The interlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes over their
intersections, and signal stars of red and green in rectangular
constellations. The trains became articulated black serpents
breathing fire.

Moreover, high overhead, like a thing put out of reach and near
forgotten, Parload had rediscovered a realm that was ruled by
neither sun nor furnace, the universe of stars.

This was the scene of many a talk we two had held together. And
if in the daytime we went right over the crest and looked westward
there was farmland, there were parks and great mansions, the spire
of a distant c