But the line of some half-dozen ragged
Scotch firs, which here topped the low cliff bordering the river, to his
disordered vision seemed most uncomfortably to run alongside him,
stretching gaunt arms through the encircling mist to arrest his flight.
He regarded them with an emotion of the liveliest antipathy; consciously
longing, meanwhile, for the humming thoroughfares of his native
industrial town, for the rattle and grind of the horse-trams, the
brightly lighted shop-fronts, the push all about him of human labour, of
booming trade and vociferous politics. Even the glare of a gin palace,
flooding out across the crowded pavement at some street corner, would
have, just now, been fraught with solace, convinced prohibitionist though
he was. For he would, at least, have been in no doubt how to feel towards
that stronghold of Satan--righteously thanking God he was not as those
reprehensible others, who passed in and out of its ever-swinging doors.
While towards this earth dominance, this dwarfing of human life by the
life of things he had hitherto called inanimate, he did not know how to
feel at all.
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