His voice might have been the voice of a belated rook on its way to Babylon Hill, or the scraping of one alder-branch against another above the waters of the Lunt, or the faint infinitesimal slide of tiny grains of gravel, as some minute earthworm in the midst of the empty little path at the top of “The Slopes” came forth to inhale the Spring night! A bubble of airy vibration, his appeal was lost as absolutely as any single drop of water that rolled at that moment down the green back of a frog emerging from the cold surface of Lenty Pond.

He kept visualizing the mud-scented darkness in which he seemed to be floating as a vast banked-up aqueduct composed of granite slabs covered with slippery black moss. Out of the spiritual tide that carried him along, there whirled up, in spurts of phosphorescent illumination, various distorted physical aspects of the people he had met these last few days. But these aspects were all ill-assorted, incongruous, maladjusted.⁠ ⁠… All these morbid evocations culminated finally in the thought of his mother; for what dispersed them and shook them indeed into nothingness now, with an abrupt materialistic shock, was the clear, sharp sound of the clattering gates of the level-crossing.