‘No, we shouldn’t.  You were bound to save us from being murdered.’

‘Then we should have had to kill a lot of other people.’

’That doesn’t matter.  We were preaching the Truth.  You can’t stop us.  We shall go on preaching in London; and then you’ll see!’

‘You can see now,’ said Pirolo, and opened a lower shutter.

We were closing on the Little Village, with her three million people spread out at ease inside her ring of girdling Main-Traffic lights—­those eight fixed beams at Chatham, Tonbridge, Redhill, Dorking, Woking, St. Albans, Chipping Ongar, and Southend.

Leopold Vincent’s new company looked, with small pale faces, at the silence, the size, and the separated houses.

Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly—­always without shame.

     MACDONOUGH’S SONG

     Whether the State can loose and bind
       In Heaven as well as on Earth: 
     If it be wiser to kill mankind
       Before or after the birth—­
     These are matters of high concern
       Where State-kept schoolmen are;
     But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
       Endeth in Holy War.

     Whether The People be led by the Lord,
       Or lured by the loudest throat: 
     If it be quicker to die by the sword
       Or cheaper to die by vote—­
     These are the things we have dealt with once,
       (And they will not rise from their grave)
     For Holy People, however it runs,
       Endeth in wholly Slave.

Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live! 
Holy State or Holy King—­
Or Holy People’s Will—­
Have no truck with the senseless thing. 
Order the guns and kill!
Saying—­after—­me:—­

Once there was The People—­Terror gave it birth; Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.  Earth arose and crushed it.  Listen, O ye slain!  Once there was The People—­it shall never be again!

Friendly Brook

(March 1914)

The valley was so choked with fog that one could scarcely see a cow’s length across a field.  Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing ditches and field-drains, all delivering to the brook below.  A week’s November rain on water-logged land had gorged her to full flood, and she proclaimed it aloud.

Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed hedge that ran down the hillside and disappeared into mist beside those roarings.  They stood back and took stock of the neglected growth, tapped an elbow of hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there, swayed a stooled ash back and forth, and looked at each other.

‘I reckon she’s about two rod thick,’ said Jabez the younger, ‘an’ she hasn’t felt iron since—­when has she, Jesse?’