of a distant cathedral, and sometimes when the weather was near
raining, the crests of remote mountains hung clearly in the sky.
Beyond the range of sight indeed, out beyond, there was Checkshill;
I felt it there always, and in the darkness more than I did by day.
Checkshill, and Nettie!

And to us two youngsters as we walked along the cinder path beside
the rutted road and argued out our perplexities, it seemed that
this ridge gave us compendiously a view of our whole world.

There on the one hand in a crowded darkness, about the ugly factories
and work-places, the workers herded together, ill clothed, ill
nourished, ill taught, badly and expensively served at every occasion
in life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from day
to day, the chapels and churches and public-houses swelling up amidst
their wretched homes like saprophytes amidst a general corruption,
and on the other, in space, freedom, and dignity, scarce heeding
the few cottages, as overcrowded as they were picturesque, in which
the laborers festered, lived the landlords and masters who owned
pot-banks and forge and farm and mine. Far away, distant, beautiful,
irrelevant, from out of a little cluster of secondhand bookshops,
ecclesiastical residences, and the inns and incidentals of a decaying
market town, the cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful,
unemphatic spire to vague incredible skies. So it seemed to us that
the whole world was planned in those youthful first impressions.

We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry, confident
solutions, and whosoever would criticize them was a friend of the
robbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there
in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with