James Harrogate, thank God for meat,
Then eat and eat and eat and eat,


or something of that kind. I faintly feel that some longer lyric was
scrawled on the walls of what looked like a bedroom, something beginning:


When laying what you call your head,
O Harrogate, upon your bed,


and there all my memory dislimns and decays. But I could still see quite
vividly the plain plastered walls and the rude, irregular writing, and the
places where the red chalk broke. I could see them, I mean, in memory;
for when I came down that road again after a sixth of a century the house
was very different.

I had seen it before at noon, and now I found it in the dusk. But its
windows glowed with lights of many artificial sorts; one of its low square
windows stood open; from this there escaped up the road a stream of
lamplight and a stream of singing. Some sort of girl, at least, was
standing at some sort of piano, and singing a song of healthy
sentimentalism in that house where long ago my blessing had died on the
wind and my poems been covered up by the wallpaper. I stood outside that
lamplit house at dusk full of those thoughts that I shall never express if
I live to be a million any better than I expressed them in red chalk upon
the wall. But after I had hovered a little, and was about to withdraw, a
mad impulse seized me. I rang the bell. I said in distinct accents to a