It seemed many years before the 'bus stopped before a brick building
full of quart pots, situated upon a gentle eminence sloping to a
coal-yard, and the voice of the conductor proclaimed that the place of
repose was reached. The Prophet and his diminutive guides descended from
the roof and were shortly in a train puffing between the hunched backs
of abominable little houses, sooty as street cats and alive with crying
babies. Then bits of waste land appeared, bald wildernesses in which
fragments of broken crockery hibernated with old tin cans and kettles
yellow as dying leaves. A furtive brown rivulet wandered here and
there like a thing endeavouring to conceal itself and unable to find a
hiding-place.
"That's the Mouse, Mr. Vivian," remarked Capricornus, proudly. "We shall
soon be there."
"Ridiculum mus," rejoined his sister, who evidently took after her
learned mother.
"Culus, Corona; and you're not to say that. Pater familias says that the
Mouse is a noble stream. We get out here, Mr. Vivian."
Here proved to be a wayside station on the very bank of the noble
stream, and on the edge of a piece of waste ground so large that it
might almost have been called country.
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