steps that the grizzled man on watch had long to wonder whether or not
the stranger brought him bash, the drug that gives a meaning to the
stars and seems to explain the twilight. And in the end there was not
a scrap of bash, and the stranger had nothing better to offer that
grizzled man than his mere story only.

It seems that the stranger's name was Gerald Jones, and he always
lived in London; but once as a child he had been on a Northern moor.
It was so long ago that he did not remember how, only somehow or other
he walked alone on the moor, and all the ling was in flower. There was
nothing in sight but ling and heather and bracken, except, far off
near the sunset, on indistinct hills, there were little vague patches
that looked like the fields of men. With evening a mist crept up and
hid the hills, and still he went walking on over the moor. And then he
came to the valley, a tiny valley in the midst of the moor, whose
sides were incredibly steep. He lay down and looked at it through the
roots of the ling. And a long, long way below him, in a garden by a
cottage, with hollyhocks all round her that were taller than herself,
there sat an old woman on a wooden chair, singing in the evening. And
the man had taken a fancy to the song and remembered it after in
London, and whenever it came to his mind it made him think of
evenings--the kind you don't get in London--and he heard a soft wind
going idly over the moor and the bumble-bees in a hurry, and forgot
the noise of the traffic. And always, whenever he heard men speak of
Time, he grudged to Time most this song. Once afterwards he went to
that Northern moor again and found the tiny valley, but there was no
old woman in the garden, and no one was singing a song. And either
regret for the song that the old woman had sung, on a summer evening
twenty years away and daily receding, troubled his mind, or else the
wearisome work that he did in London, for he worked for a great firm