A RETURN TO NATURE 79 



cern us, which had nothing to do with what we had been 

 taught at school, had read in books or had heard from 

 our fathers and mothers. When he was angry the head 

 of the firm used to say we had better take care or a 

 machine would supersede us in ten years instead of 

 twenty. We had been driven out of life into a corner in 

 an underground passage where everything was unnecessary 

 that did not help us to be quick at figures, or taking down 

 letters from dictation, or neat in dress and obedient to 

 the slaves who were set over us. When we were out of 

 the office we could do nothing which unfitted us for it. 

 The head of the firm used to say that we were each 

 ' playing a part, however humble, in the sublime machine 

 of modern civilization, that not one of us was unneces- 

 sary, and that we must no more complain or grow restive 

 than does the earth because it is one of the least elements 

 in this majestic universe.' We continued to be neat 

 when we were away from the office, we were disobedient 

 to everything and everybody else that was not armed with 

 the power of taking away our bread — to the old, the 

 poor, the children, the women, the ideas which we had 

 never dreamed of, and that came among us as a white 

 blackbird comes in the winter to a barbarous parish where 

 keeper and gardener and farmer go out with their guns 

 and stalk it from hedge to hedge until, starved and con- 

 spicuous and rather apart from its companions, it falls to 

 their beastly shot and is sold to one of the gentry who 

 puts it into a glass case. 



" Sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday I broke away in 

 a vague unrest, and walked alone to the pretty places 

 where my father and mother had taken me as a little boy. 



