it would not be interesting, or really whisper to one the strange, happy, human things of another world—­even of this world, that make the old tombstones such good company and so friendly to us.  One gives a glance at the stone and passes on.  It was made by machinery, apparently; a machine might have designed it, a machine might have died and been buried under it.  One looks beyond it at all the others like it—­all the glib, competent-looking white stones.  Were the silenced people all machines under them, all mechanical, all made to a pattern like their stones, like these strangely hard, brief tombstones standing here at their heads, summing up their lives before us curtly, heartlessly, on this gentle old hillside?

I wondered.

I looked back to the old eloquent cemetery that almost seemed to be breathing things, and looked once more at the new.

And as I stood and thought, they seemed to me to be two worlds—­one the world the people all about me are always saying sadly is going by, and the other—­well, the one we will have to have.

* * * * *

As I look off from the hilltop at the great sloping countryside about me, which stretches miles and miles, with its green fields, and bushy treetops, its red roofs, its banners of steam from twenty railways, its huge, grim, furious chimneys, its still, sleepy steeples, I also see two worlds, the same two worlds over again that I saw in the churchyard, except that they are all jumbled together—­the complacent, capable, cut-out, homeless-looking houses, the little snuggled-down old ones with their happy trees about them and trails of cooking smoke.  I see the same two worlds standing and facing each other before me whichever way I turn.

And when I slip out of the churchyard from those two little separate worlds of the dead, and move slowly down the long bustling village street, and look into the faces of the living, the same two worlds that were in the churchyard and on the hills seem to look at me out of the faces of the living too.

The faces go hurrying past me, worlds apart.  Most people, I imagine, who read these pages must have noticed the people’s faces in the streets nowadays—­how they seem to have come out of separate worlds into the street a moment, and hurry past, and seem to be going back in a moment more to separate worlds.

There is hardly even a village footway left anywhere to-day where one cannot see these two worlds, or the spirit of these two worlds, flitting past one through the streets in people’s faces, and nightly before our eyes, struggling with each other to possess, to swallow away into itself human souls, to master the fate of man upon the earth.

One of these is the World of the Hand-made; the other is the Machine-made World.

* * * * *