threateningly on the edge of this heath even when I walked over it years
ago and almost as a boy. I was astonished that the building had gone no
farther; I suppose somebody went bankrupt and somebody else disliked
building. But I remember, especially along one side of this tangle or
coppice, that there had once been a row of half-built houses. The brick
of which they were built was a sort of plain pink; everything else was a
blinding white; the houses smoked with white dust and white sawdust; and
on many of the windows were rubbed those round rough disks of white which
always delighted me as a child. They looked like the white eyes of some
blind giant.

I could see the crude, parched pink-and-white villas still; though I had
not thought at all of them for a quarter of my life; and had not thought
much of them even when I saw them. Then I was an idle, but eager youth
walking out from London; now I was a most reluctantly busy middle-aged
person, coming in from the country. Youth, I think, seems farther off
than childhood, for it made itself more of a secret. Like a prenatal
picture, distant, tiny, and quite distinct, I saw this heath on which I
stood; and I looked around for the string of bright, half-baked villas.
They still stood there; but they were quite russet and weather-stained, as
if they had stood for centuries.

I remembered exactly what I had done on that day long ago. I had half
slid on a miry descent; it was still there; a little lower I had knocked
off the top of a thistle; the thistles had not been discouraged, but were
still growing. I recalled it because I had wondered why one knocks off
the tops of thistles; and then I had thought of Tarquin; and then I had
recited most of Macaulay's VIRGINIA to myself, for I was young. And then
I came to a tattered edge where the very tuft had whitened with the
sawdust and brick-dust from the new row of houses; and two or three green