And then one night the roll in which our poor tree found himself was carried to the printing-rooms and fixed in the press, and down came the heavy, messy type on it, all black and suffocating, and when the tree came to itself in the light again it was covered with words.
But, alas! the sparrows were right, for they were not beautiful words or grand words, but such words as, “Society Divorce Case,” and “Double Suicide at Margate,” and “Will it be fine to-morrow?” and “Breach of Promise: Comic Letters,” and “The Progress of the Strike,” and “Terrible Accident near Paris,” and “Grisly Discovery at Leeds,” and “Bankruptcy of Peer’s Cousin,” and “Burglary at Potter’s Bar,” and “More Government Lies”; and there were offers of a thousand pounds and smaller sums to cottagers for the best bunch of Sweet Williams, bringing to myriad simple homes in England, where flowers had been loved for their own sake, the alloy of avarice.
“Oh, dear,” sighed the tree as it realized what it was bearing on its surface, “how I wish I had gone to sea as I was meant to do!” And he vowed that if ever he got out of this dreadful life he would never be headstrong again. But alas!—
Then, cut and folded, it was, with others like it, carried away in the cold, grey morning to a railway station bookstall, and a man bought it for a halfpenny and read it all through, and said there was nothing in it, and threw it under the seat, and later another man found it and read it, and blew choking tobacco over it, and then wrapped up some fish in it, and took it home to his family. All that night it lay scrunched up on the floor of a squalid house, feeling very faint from the smell of fish, and longing for Newfoundland and the sun and the rain, and the children and the birds.
And the next morning an untidy woman lit the fire with it. It was an unimportant fire, and went out directly.
The Life Spherical
It was a beautiful September day, and they floated softly over green Surrey.
“And this is England!” said the foreigner. “I am indeed glad to be here at last, and to come in such a way.”
“You could not,” the other replied, “have chosen a more novel or entertaining means of seeing the country for the first time.”