Old Junk

the isolation of the place. Clayton appeared to be two railway platforms and a row of elms across an empty road. After the last rumble of the train, which had the note of a distant cry of derisi

s the leaking conduit for all the so

eyes so that the lad seemed a luminous and disembodied stare. I saw only the projection of his enlarged gaze. He promised to take my luggage to Clayton. I walked through three miles of steady rain to the village, by a stretch of marshland so hushed by the nearn

s of automatic machines look out across the empty parade, and rust, and the lines of the pier-deck advance desolately far into the wind and grey sea, straight and uninterrupted. It is more than barren then, Clayton-on-Sea, for man has been there, builded busily and even ornately, loaded the town with structures for even his minor whims in idleness; and forsaken it all. So it will look on the Last Day. The advertisements clamour pills and hair-dye to a

ove was a glass case of shabby sea-birds, their eyes so placed that they appeared to be looking up from Holy Writ with a look of such fatuous rapture that one's idea of immortality became associated with bodies dusty, stuffed, and wired. (Oh, the

eighbours to make a journey to greater Clayton prohibitive. In one corner of his shop a young lady was caged, for it was also the post office. The interior of the store was confused with boxes, barrels, bags, and barricades of smaller tins and jars, with alleys for sidelong progress between them

for the grocer's lamp was then the centre of a very dark world. Around it and beyond was only the blackness and silence of vacuity. And the grocer himself, if not busy, would give me his casual and valuable advice on the minor frailties of the human, and they seemed as engaging and confusing in their directness as a child's; for Mr. Monk was large and bland, with a pale, puffy, and u

ut. There's nothing fer 'em here but farm labour an' the poor rate. I don't know how the farmers about here could make a do of it if we didn't pay rates to keep their labourers from dying off. My boys get fed up. Off they go, 'nd I doan' blame 'em. One of 'em's in a racin' stable now, doin' well. Another's got a potman's job London somewhere. Doin' well. But the kid I've got now, he'll stop. No ginger in that

rprised inquiry, and his mouth open. Mr. Monk chaffed him. I spoke with some seriousness to him, but he was shy, and gave no answer except some throat noises. Yet presently he ceased to rub a boot up and down one leg, and became articulate. He mumbled that he knew the telegraph instrument too. ("Oho!" said Mr. Monk, looking interest

e of those highly technical diagrams of involved machinery which only the elect may read. I took the book--it was a manual of civil engineering--and asked questions with some humility; for before the man who understands the manipulating of metals and can make living servants for himself out of

humiliating interviews with Mr. Monk concerning the wrong delivery of cheese and bacon. I was aware of the means by which news of the outer world got to Clayton. It came in a popular halfpenny paper, and that outer world must therefore have seemed to Clayton to be all aeroplanes, musical-comedy girls, dog shows, and Mr. Lloyd George. The grocer's boy got his

eaf and dumb. Some miles away the smoke of the London train was streaming across the dim fields like a comet. We both stood watching that comet going sure and bright to its destiny, leaving Clayton behind, regardless of us, and as though a

left my stuffed birds, with their fixed and upturned gaze, and went into the open, where above the shapeless lumps of massive dark of Clayton the stars were

e, finding I did not understand him, towards his home. We went round to the back of the sleeping cottage, and found a little shed. On a bench in that shed a candle was burning in a ginger-beer bottle. By the candle was a structure meaningless to me, having nothing of which I could make a

ask the lad why I should listen, for the shed was very still, and then I saw the hammer of the bell lift itself, as though alive. Some erratic and