glow-worms' lamps and partly like the sea; it went by rippling, full
of wonderful moons. But the traveller did not look at the wonderful
moons. For from the abyss there grew with their roots in far
constellations a row of hollyhocks, and amongst them a small green
garden quivered and trembled as scenes tremble in water; higher up,
ling in bloom was floating upon the twilight, more and more floated up
till all the twilight was purple; the little green garden low down was
hung in the midst of it. And the garden down below, and the ling all
round it, seemed all to be trembling and drifting on a song. For the
twilight was full of a song that sang and rang along the edges of the
World, and the green garden and the ling seemed to flicker and ripple
with it as the song rose and fell, and an old woman was singing it
down in the garden. A bumble-bee sailed across from over the Edge of
the World. And the song that was lapping there against the coasts of
the World, and to which the stars were dancing, was the same that he
had heard the old woman sing long since down in the valley in the
midst of the Northern moor.

But that grizzled man, the long porter, would not let the stranger
stay, because he brought him no bash, and impatiently he shouldered
him away, himself not troubling to glance through the World's
outermost window, for the lands that Time afflicts and the spaces that
Time knows not are all one to that grizzled man, and the bash that he
eats more profoundly astounds his mind than anything man can show him
either in the World we know or over the Edge. And, bitterly
protesting, the traveller went back and down again to the World.

. . . . .

Accustomed as I am to the incredible from knowing the Edge of the