publisher; it had to wait until the way was prepared by its coarser and
more vigorous workfellow. A friend writes: 'I well remember the appearance
of the MS. Gissing wrote then on thin foreign paper in a small, thin
handwriting, without correction. It was before the days of typewriting, and
the MS. of a three-volume novel was so compressed that one could literally
put it in one's pocket without the slightest inconvenience.' The name is
from Byron's _Elegy on Thyrza_.]

'A street organ began to play in front of a public-house close by.
Grail drew near; there were children forming a dance, and he stood to
watch them.

Do you know that music of the obscure ways, to which children dance?
Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears' affliction beneath
your windows in the square. To hear it aright you must stand in the
darkness of such a by-street as this, and for the moment be at one
with those who dwell around, in the blear-eyed houses, in the dim
burrows of poverty, in the unmapped haunts of the semi-human. Then you
will know the significance of that vulgar clanging of melody; a pathos
of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of
hidden London will be half revealed. The life of men who toil without
hope, yet with the hunger of an unshaped desire; of women in whom the
sweetness of their sex is perishing under labour and misery; the
laugh, the song of the girl who strives to enjoy her year or two of
youthful vigour, knowing the darkness of the years to come; the
careless defiance of the youth who feels his blood and revolts against
the lot which would tame it; all that is purely human in these
darkened multitudes speaks to you as you listen. It is the
half-conscious striving of a nature which knows not what it would
attain, which deforms a true thought by gross expression, which