A RETURN TO NATURE 77 



looked as if it mattered, not like their own ledger work 

 and so on. I had the same sort of pleasure looking up 

 the street that rose from east to west and seeing the sun 

 set between the two precipices of brick wall at the top; 

 it was as if a gate opened there and through it all the 

 people and things that saddened me had disappeared and 

 left me to myself; it was like the pit, too, that opened 

 before me as a little child. 



" My father died of consumption. I was then just 

 able to earn my own living, so I was left in lodgings 

 and my mother returned to Wales. I worked hard at 

 figures; at least I went early and stayed late and never 

 stopped to talk to the others; yet I made frequent mis- 

 takes, and the figures swam in a mist of American rivers 

 and English waterfalls and gipsy camps, so that it was a 

 wonder I could ever see my Thoreau and Wordsworth 

 and Borrow without these figures. Fancy men adopting 

 as a cry the ' right to work ' ! Apparently they are too 

 broken-spirited to think of a right to live, and would be 

 content only to work. It is not wonderful that with 

 such a cry they do very little. Men cannot fight hard 

 for the ' right to work ' as I did. My office was at the 

 bottom of a pit. The four sides of the pit were walls 

 with many windows, and I could hear voices speaking in 

 the rooms behind and the click of typewriters, but could 

 not see into them. Only for two or three days in June 

 could I see the sun out of the pit. But in the hot days 

 blue-bottles buzzed on my panes and I took care of them 

 until one by one they lay dead upon the window ledge. 

 There were no spiders and they seemed to have a good 

 life. Sparrows sometimes flew up and down the pit, and 



