knows it." Which to Paul was a solution of peculiar comfort.

Even the blackened lands between the towns had their charm for Paul,
in that he had a gleeful sense of being excluded from the wrath of
God, which fell continuously upon them and the inhabitants thereof.
And here and there a belt of leafy country gave promise, or
confirmed Barney Bill's promise, of the Paradise that would come.
Besides, what mattered the perpetuations of Bludston brickfields
when the Land of Beulah shimmered ahead in the blue distance, when
"Martin Chuzzlewit" lay open on his knees, when the smell of the bit
of steak sizzling on the cooking stove stung his young blood? And
now they were in Warwickshire, county of verdant undulations and
deep woods and embowered villages. Every promise that Barney Bill
had made to him of beauty was in process of fulfilment. There were
no more blighted towns, no more factories, no more chimneys belching
forth smoke. This was the Earth, the real broad-bosomed Mother
Earth. What he had left was the Hell upon Earth. What he was going
to might be Paradise, but Paul's imagination rightly boggled at the
conception of a Paradise more perfect. And, as Paul's prescient wit
had conjectured, he was learning many things; the names of trees and
wild flowers, the cries of birds, the habits of wayside beasts; what
was good for a horse to eat and what was bad; which was the Waggon,
and Orion's Belt and the Bunch of Keys in the heavens; how to fry
bacon and sew up rents in his clothing; how to deal with his
fellow-man, or, rather, with his fellow-woman, in a persuasive
manner; how to snare a rabbit or a pheasant and convert it into
food, and how, at the same time, to evade the terrors of the law;
the differences between wheat and oats and barley; the main lines of
cleavage between political parties, hitherto a puzzle to Paul, for
Barney Bill was a politician (on the Conservative side) and read his