that swayed beneath me. I could almost draw the tortuous pattern of the
faded cloth that hid the round table at which I sat. The ink was thick,
pale, and sticky; the pen spluttered. I wrote furiously, anxious to be
done with it. Once I went and leaned over the balcony, trying to hit on
a word that would not come. Miles down below, little people crawled over
the cobbled street, little carts rattled, little workmen let down casks
into a cellar. It was all very grey, small, and clear.

Through the open window of an opposite garret I could see a sculptor
working at a colossal clay model. In his white blouse he seemed big, out
of all proportion to the rest of the world. Level with my eyes there
were flat lead roofs and chimneys. On one of these was scrawled, in big,
irregular, blue-painted letters: "_A has Coignet_."

Great clouds began to loom into view over the house-tops, rounded,
toppling masses of grey, lit up with sullen orange against the pale
limpid blue of the sky. I stood and looked at all these objects. I had
come out here to think--thoughts had deserted me. I could only look.

The clouds moved imperceptibly, fatefully onward, a streak of lightning
tore them apart. They whirled like tortured smoke and grew suddenly
black. Large spots of rain with jagged edges began to fall on the lead
floor of my balcony.

I turned into the twilight of my room and began to write. I can still
feel the tearing of my pen-point on the coarse paper. It was a hindrance
to thought, but my flow of words ignored it, gained impetus from it, as
a stream does at the breaking of a dam.

I was writing a pæan to a great coloniser. That sort of thing was in the