Sometimes men found my bones and buried them, but the tradition never
died, and my friends' successors always brought them back. At last the
barges went no more, and there were fewer lights; shaped timbers no longer
floated down the fairway, and there came instead old wind-uprooted trees
in all their natural simplicity.

At last I was aware that somewhere near me a blade of grass was growing,
and the moss began to appear all over the dead houses. One day some
thistledown went drifting over the river.

For some years I watched these signs attentively, until I became certain
that London was passing away. Then I hoped once more, and all along both
banks of the river there was anger among the lost things that anything
should dare to hope upon the forsaken mud. Gradually the horrible houses
crumbled, until the poor dead things that never had had life got decent
burial among the weeds and moss. At last the may appeared and the
convolvulus. Finally, the wild rose stood up over mounds that had been
wharves and warehouses. Then I knew that the cause of Nature had
triumphed, and London had passed away.

The last man in London came to the wall by the river, in an ancient cloak
that was one of those that once my friends had worn, and peered over the
edge to see that I still was there. Then he went, and I never saw men
again: they had passed away with London.

A few days after the last man had gone the birds came into London, all the
birds that sing. When they first saws me they all looked sideways at me,
then they went away a little and spoke among themselves.

"He only sinned against Man," they said; "it is not our quarrel."