speak, that his eyes were turned
inwards. When Turnbull said something to him about London, they seemed
to move as at a summons and come out like two householders coming out
into their doorways.

"Yes," he said, with a sort of stupidity. "It's a very big place."

There was a somewhat unmeaning silence, and then MacIan said again:

"It's a very big place. When I first came into it I was frightened of
it. Frightened exactly as one would be frightened at the sight of a
man forty feet high. I am used to big things where I come from, big
mountains that seem to fill God's infinity, and the big sea that goes
to the end of the world. But then these things are all shapeless and
confused things, not made in any familiar form. But to see the plain,
square, human things as large as that, houses so large and streets
so large, and the town itself so large, was like having screwed some
devil's magnifying glass into one's eye. It was like seeing a porridge
bowl as big as a house, or a mouse-trap made to catch elephants."

"Like the land of the Brobdingnagians," said Turnbull, smiling.

"Oh! Where is that?" said MacIan.

Turnbull said bitterly, "In a book," and the silence fell suddenly
between them again.

They were sitting in a sort of litter on the hillside; all the things
they had hurriedly collected, in various places, for their flight, were
strewn indiscriminately round them. The two swords with which they had
lately sought each other's lives were flung down on the grass at random,
like two idle walking-sticks. Some provisions they had bought last
night, at a low public house, in case of undefined contingencies, were
tossed about like the materials of an ordinary picnic, here a basket
of chocolate, and there a bottle of wine. And to add to the disorder
finally, there were strewn on top of everything, the most disorderly
of modern things, newspapers, and more newspapers, and yet again
newspapers, the ministers of the modern anarchy. Turnbull picked up one
of them drearily, and took out a pipe.

"There's a lot about us," he said. "Do you mind if I light up?"

"Why should I mind?" asked MacIan.

Turnbull eyed with a certain studious interest, the man who did not
understand any of the verbal courtesies; he lit his pipe and blew great
clouds out of it.

"Yes," he resumed. "The matter on which you and I are engaged is at this
moment really the best copy in England. I am a journalist, and I know.
For the first time, perhaps,