"Then it must be Baxter's Rents."
"No."
"Bunhill Row?"
"No."
"No? Well, there is not much else here," he said; and he shrugged his shoulders, "except the Fields and the burial-ground. Your business does not lie with the latter, I suppose?"
"No," I said faintly. And we stood.
At another time I must have shuddered at the dreary expanse on this uttermost fringe of the town that stretched before us under a waning light; an expanse of waste land broken only by the wall of the burial-ground, or the chimney of a brick-kiln, and bordered, where its limits were visible, by half-built houses, and squatter huts, and vast piles of refuse. Ugly as the prospect was, however, and far from reassuring to the timorous, I asked nothing better than to look at it. and look at it, and continue to look at it. But Mr. Smith, who did not understand this mood, turned with an impatient laugh.
"I suppose that you did not come here to look at that," said he.
Like a fool I jumped at the absurd, the flimsy pretext.
"Yes," I said. "I--I merely came to take the air."