If it
is clean out of the course of things, and has apparently no causes
and no consequences, subsequent events do not recall it, and it
remains only a subconscious thing, to be stirred by some accident
long after. It drifts apart like a forgotten dream; and it was in
the hour of many dreams, at daybreak and very soon after the end of
dark, that such a strange sight was given to a man sculling a boat
down a river in the West country. The man was awake; indeed, he
considered himself rather wide awake, being the political
journalist, Harold March, on his way to interview various political
celebrities in their country seats. But the thing he saw was so
inconsequent that it might have been imaginary. It simply slipped
past his mind and was lost in later and utterly different events;
nor did he even recover the memory till he had long afterward
discovered the meaning.
Pale mists of morning lay on the fields and the rushes along one
margin of the river; along the other side ran a wall of tawny brick
almost overhanging the water. He had shipped his oars and was
drifting for a moment with the stream, when he turned his head and
saw that the monotony of the long brick wall was broken by a bridge;
rather an elegant eighteenth-century sort of bridge with little
columns of white stone turning gray.
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