up in solemn warning against me. The day after that again, I set out
on my task. The pull was hard. I had taken my own affairs entirely
into my own hands by that time, and had provided myself with money
for a long stay at Woodbury. But it was the very first railway
journey I could ever remember to have made alone; and I confess,
when I found myself seated all by myself in a first-class carriage,
with no friend beside me, my resolution for a moment almost broke
down again. It was so terrible to feel oneself boxed up there for an
hour or two alone, with that awful Picture staring one in the face
all the time from every fence and field and wall and hoarding. It
obliterated Fry's Cocoa; it fixed itself on the yellow face of
Colman's Mustard.

I went by Liverpool Street, and drove across to Paddington. I had
never, to my knowledge, been in London before: and it was all so new
to me. But Liverpool Street was even newer to me than Paddington, I
noticed. A faint sense of familiarity seemed to hang about the Great
Western line. And that was not surprising, I thought, as I turned it
over; for, of course, in the old days, when we lived at Woodbury, I
must often have come down from town that way with my father. Yet I
remembered nothing of it all definitely; the most I could say was
that I seemed dimly to recollect having been there before--though
when or where or how, I hadn't the faintest notion.

I was early at Paddington. The refreshment room somehow failed to
attract me. I walked up and down the platform, waiting for my train.
As I did so, a boy pasted a poster on a board: it was the
contents-sheet of one of the baser little Society papers. Something
strange in it caught my eye. I looked again in amazement. Oh, great
heavens! what was this in big flaring letters?