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Our road to this city of decadence leads gradually downward, through a broad, sinking moorland, covered with weeds and wild flowers rich, monotonous, desolate. The broidery of pink flax and yellow chrysanthemums and white marguerites still follows us; but now the wider stretches of thistles and burdocks and daturas and cockleburs and water-plantains seem to be more important.
Hedgehog was now dying of curiosity. She said she thought the children's spines were strong enough for anything that was likely to happen to them; and so the next fresh damp evening we sent the seven urchins down to the burdocks to pick snails, and crept cautiously towards the tinker's encampment to see what we could see.
The street having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable was now precisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous wooden fence, of open lattice-work, through which could be seen a grassy yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, two or three feet long.
My ordinary way to it was through a piece of waste, which, with unintentional sarcasm, was called the 'Little Park. It was overgrown by burdocks, to which it had been abandoned for years who could tell how many? and was rambled over by turkeys, guinea-hens, and other poultry.
Yes, it was right glorious out in the country. In the midst of the sunshine there lay an old farm, with deep canals about it, and from the wall down to the water grew great burdocks, so high that little children could stand upright under the loftiest of them.
The cedar poles of the electric lights had been cut into fence-rails; the wooden shanties of the Italian gang of Auriferous workers had been torn down and split into fire wood; and where they had stood, the burdocks and the thistles of the luxuriant summer conspired to hide the traces of their shame.
He looked most pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct, like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity under a new dispensation; the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the rain dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most entire indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone.
Before his eyes stretched an immense waste, bounded by a grey fence beside which ran a perfect forest of last year's burdocks. Beyond the waste ground was a dark, deserted factory, with windows boarded up. A belated jackdaw was flying round the chimney. This dreary, lifeless scene was beginning to be veiled in the dusk of evening. "I must go home!" the jeune premier heard. "Where is home?"
A holy calm rested on her face, as if the earthly remains bore the impress of the truth that she now stood in the presence of God. In the forest the wonderful plant still continued to bloom till it grew and became almost a tree, and all the birds of passage bowed themselves before it. "That plant is a foreigner, no doubt," said the thistles and the burdocks.
Behind the house a wide yard with nettles, wormwood, and burdocks in the corners, outbuildings with doors that stick, doves and rooks on the thatched roofs, a little storehouse with a rusty weathercock, two or three birch-trees with rooks' nests in their bare top branches, and beyond the road with cushions of soft dust in the ruts and a field and the long hurdles of the hemp patches, and the grey little huts of the village, and the cackle of geese in the far-away rich meadows.... Is all this familiar to you, reader?
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