stones had been steadily refusing to grow. They were not a bit bigger
than the poor victims I could remember. Also, the paving operations
seemed to be exactly at the same point at which I left them forty years
before. There were the dull, torn-up patches on that bright expanse, the
piles of paving material looking ominously black, like heads of rocks on
a silvery sea. Who was it that said that Time works wonders? What an
exploded superstition! As far as these trees and these paving stones
were concerned, it had worked nothing. The suspicion of the
unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to my senses by our
rapid drive from the railway station was agreeably strengthened within
me.

"We are now on the line A.B.," I said to my companion, importantly.

It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the Square by
the senior students of that town of classical learning and historical
relics. The common citizens knew nothing of it, and, even if they had,
would not have dreamed of taking it seriously. He who used it was of the
initiated, belonged to the Schools. We youngsters regarded that name as
a fine jest, the invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered
it to my boy I experienced again that sense of my privileged initiation.
And then, happening to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of the
corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an
inscription in raised black letters, thus: "Line A.B." Heavens! The
name had been adopted officially! Any town urchin, any guttersnipe, any
herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering Boeotian, was free
to talk of the line A.B., to walk on the line A.B., to appoint to meet
his friends on the line A.B. It had become a mere name in a directory. I
was stunned by the extreme mutability of things. Time could work
wonders, and no mistake. A Municipality had stolen an invention of