well-known "Some other time, dear!" told me that hope was finally
dead. Then I left the room without any remark. It made it
worse--if anything could--to hear that stale, worn-out old
phrase, still supposed by those dullards to have some efficacy.

To nature, as usual, I drifted by instinct, and there, out of the
track of humanity, under a friendly hedge-row had my black hour
unseen. The world was a globe no longer, space was no more
filled with whirling circuses of spheres. That day the old
beliefs rose up and asserted themselves, and the earth was flat
again--ditch-riddled, stagnant, and deadly flat. The undeviating
roads crawled straight and white, elms dressed themselves stiffly
along inflexible hedges, all nature, centrifugal no longer,
sprawled flatly in lines out to its farthest edge, and I felt
just like walking out to that terminus, and dropping quietly
off. Then, as I sat there, morosely chewing bits of stick, the
recollection came back to me of certain fascinating
advertisements I had spelled out in the papers--advertisements of
great and happy men, owning big ships of tonnage running into
four figures, who yet craved, to the extent of public
supplication, for the sympathetic co-operation of youths as
apprentices. I did not rightly know what apprentices might be,
nor whether I was yet big enough to be styled a youth; but one
thing seemed clear, that, by some such means as this, whatever
the intervening hardships, I could eventually visit all the
circuses of the world--the circuses of merry France and gaudy
Spain, of Holland and Bohemia, of China and Peru. Here was a
plan worth thinking out in all its bearings; for something had
presently to be done to end this intolerable state of things.