ith
keen feminine satisfaction, how useless in the long run are all the
negatives of man.

In later years, though many memories intervene, the Prophet will never
forget his journey to the banks of the Mouse. Always it seemed very
strange to him and dream-like, that everlasting journey upon the purple
'bus, complicated by the chatter of the younger scions of the Malkiel
dynasty, and by the shrill cries of the conductor summoning the
passers-by to hasten to that place of repose consecrated to the worthy
and hard-working individuals who drew their modest incomes from the pig.
The character of the streets changed as the central districts were left
behind, and a curious scent, the scent of Suburbia, seemed to float
between the tall chimneys in the morose atmosphere. The purple chariot,
which rolled on and on like the chariot of Fate, drew gradually away
from the large thoroughfares into mean streets, whose air of dull
gentility was for ever autumnal, and the Prophet, on passing some
gigantic gasworks, mechanically wondered whether it might not, perhaps,
be that monument to whose shadow Malkiel the First had lived and died.
Once, looking up at the black sky, he remarked to the little Capricornus
that it was evidently going to rain.

"No, Mr. Vivian," replied the boy. "It won't rain hard this week.
January's a fine month, but there'll be heavy floods in March,
especially along the banks of the Thames."

"And in February there'll be such a lot of scarlet fever in the southern
portions of England," added the little Corona. "Oh, Corney, just look at
that kitty on the airey railings!"

"Area, Corona," corrected her brother. "Oh, my! ain't it funny?"

The Prophet remembered that he was travelling with the scions of a
prophetic house.

It seemed many years before the 'bus stopped before a brick building
full of quart pots, situated upon a gentle eminence sloping to a
coal-yard, and the voice of the conductor proclaimed that the place of
repose was reached. The Prophet and his diminutive guides descended from
the roof and were shortly in a train puffing between the hunched backs
of abominable little houses, sooty as street cats and alive with crying
babies. Then bits of waste land appeared, bald wildernesses in which
fragments of broken crockery hibernated with old tin cans and kettles
yellow as dying leaves. A furtive brown rivulet wandered here and
there like a thing endeavouring to conceal itself and unable to find a
hidin