We strolled along to the parting
of many ways at King's Cross Station, and struck boldly up Pentonville. Again: on our left was Barnsbury, which is like Africa. In Barnsbury
semper aliquid novi, but our course was laid for us by some occult
influence, and we came to Islington and chose the right hand side of the
way. So far, we were tolerably in the region of the known, since every
year there is the great Cattle Show at Islington, and many men go there. But, trending to the right, we got into Canonbury, of which there are
only Travellers' Tales. Now and then, perhaps, as one sits about the
winter fire, while the storm howls without and the snow falls fast, the
silent man in the corner has told how he had a great aunt who lived in
Canonbury in 1860; so in the fourteenth century you might meet men who
had talked with those who had been in Cathay and had seen the splendours
of the Grand Cham. Such is Canonbury; I hardly dare speak of its dim
squares, of the deep, leafy back-gardens behind the houses, running down
into obscure alleyways with discreet, mysterious postern doors: as I
say, "Travellers' Tales"; things not much credited._

_But, he who adventures in London has a foretaste of infinity. There is
a region beyond Ultima Thule. I know not how it was, but on this famous
Sunday afternoon, my friend and I, passing through Canonbury came into
something called the Balls Pond Road--Mr. Perch, the messenger of Dombey
& Son, lived somewhere in this region--and so I think by Dalston down
into Hackney where caravans, or trams, or, as I think you say in
America, trolley cars set out at stated intervals to the limits of the
western world._

_But in the course of that walk which had become an exploration of the
unknown, I had seen two common things which had made a profound
impression upon me. One of these things was a street, the other a small
family party. The street was somewhere in that vague, uncharted, Balls
Pond-Dalston region. It was a long street and a grey street. Each house
was exactly like every other house. Each house had a basement, the sort
of story which house-agents have grown to call of late a "lower ground
floor." The front windows of these basements were half above the patch
of black, soot-smeared soil and coarse grass that named itself a garden,
and so, passing along at the hour of four o'clock or four-thirty, I
could see that in everyone of these "breakfast rooms"--their technical
name--the tea tray and the tea cups were set out in readiness. I
received from this trivial and natural circumstance an impression of a
dull life, laid out in dreadful lines of patterned uniformity, of a life
without adventure of body or soul._

_Then, the family party. It got into the tram down Hackney way. There
were father, mother and baby; and I should think that they came from a
small shop, probably from a small draper's shop. The parents were young
people of twenty-five to thirty-five. He wore a black shiny frock
coat--an "Albert" in America?--a high hat, little side whiskers and dark
moustache and a look of amiable vacuity. His wife was oddly bedizened in
black satin, with a wide spreading hat, not ill-looking, simply
unmeaning. I fancy that she had at times, not too often, "a temper of
her own." And the very small baby sat upon her knee. The party was
probably going forth to spend the Sunday evening with relations or
friends._

_And yet, I said to myself, these two have partaken together of the
great mystery, of the great sacrament of nature, of the source of all
that is magical in the wide world. But have they discerned the
mysteries? Do they know that they have been in that place which is
called Syon and Jerusalem?--I am quoting from an old book and a strange
book._

_It was thus that, remembering the old story of the "Resurrection of the
Dead," I was furnished with the source of "A Fragment of Life." I was
writing "Hieroglyphics" at the time, having just finished "The White
People"; or rather, having just decided that what now appears in print
under that heading was all that would ever be written, that the Great
Romance that should have been written--in manifestation of the
idea--would never be written at all. And so, when Hieroglyphics was
finished, somewhere about May 1899, I set about "A Fragment of Life" and
wrote the first chapter with the greatest relish and the utmost ease. And then my own life was dashed into fragments. I ceased to write. I
travelled. I saw Syon and Bagdad and other strange places--see "Things
Near and Far" for an explanation of this obscure passage--and found
myself in the lighted world of floats and battens, entering L. U. E.,
crossing R and exiting R 3; and doing all sorts of queer things._

_But still, in spite of all these shocks and changes, the "notion" would
not leave me. I went at it again, I suppose in 1904; consumed with a
bitter determination to finish what I had begun. Everything now had
become difficult. I tried this way and that way and the other way. They
all failed and I broke down on every one of them; and I tried and tried
again. At last I cobbled up some sort of an end, an utterly bad one, as
I realized as I wrote every single line and word of it, and the story
appeared, in 1904 or 1905, in Horlick's Magazine under the editorship of
my old and dear friend, A. E. Waite._

_Still; I was not satisfied. That end was intolerable and I knew it. Again, I sat down to the work, night after night I wrestled with it. And
I remember an odd circumstance which may or may not be of some
physiological interest. I was then living in a circumscribed "upper
part" of a house in Cosway Street, Marylebone Road. That I might
struggle by myself, I wrote in the little kitchen; and night after night
as I fought grimly, savagely, all but hopelessly for some fit close for
"A Fragment of Life," I was astonished and almost alarmed to find that
my feet developed a sensation of most deadly cold. The room was not
cold; I had lit the oven burners of the little gas cooking stove. I was
not cold; but my feet were chilled in a quite extraordinary manner, as
if they had been packed in ice. At last I took off my slippers with a
view of poking my toes into the oven of the stove, and feeling my feet
with my hand, I perceived that, in fact, they were not cold at all! But
the sensation remained; there, I suppose, you have an odd case of a
transference of something that was happening in the brain to the
extremities. My feet were quite warm to the palm of my hand, but to my
sense they were frozen. But what a testimony to the fitness of the
American idiom, "cold feet," as signifying a depressed and desponding
mood! But, somehow or other, the tale was finished and the "notion" was
at last out of my head.