He tried both, but both confused him equally, and he came straying back to the same spot. “I remember there were poles pushed out of upper windows on which clothes were drying, and I remember a low public-house, and the sound flowing down a narrow passage belonging to it of the scraping of a fiddle and the shuffling of feet. But here are all these things in the lane, and here are all these things in the alley. And I have nothing else in my mind but a wall, a dark doorway, a flight of stairs, and a room.”

He tried a new direction, but made nothing of it; walls, dark doorways, flights of stairs and rooms, were too abundant. And, like most people so puzzled, he again and again described a circle, and found himself at the point from which he had begun. “This is like what I have read in narratives of escape from prison,” said he, “where the little track of the fugitives in the night always seems to take the shape of the great round world, on which they wander; as if it were a secret law.”