They were thick with dust, lying higgledy-piggledy in the press, tortoise-cores and a scraper or so, you took them out and turned them about, and saw the wavery lines of the knapping done long ago in the hills of the Howe, some day three thousand years before. Some careful craftsman had squatted to knapp, with careful knee and finger and eye, looking up now and then from his work on the flakes to see the grey glister of the Howe below, the long lake that covered the Low Mearns then, with sailing shapes of islands upon it, smoke of fires rising slow in the air from the squatting-places of the Simple Men, deer belling far on the hills as the sun swung over to the hazes of the afternoon, things plain and clear to anyone then—you supposed: was that no more than supposing?

But at least they had made the things they desired, finely and surely and lovely as these, long long ago. Still, things no lovelier than the shining giants that whirred and spun in Gowans and Gloag’s, power-dreams fulfilled of the flint-knapping men…. And at that the little warmth they had brought you quite went, you were staring down at a dusty stone, chipped by someone no shape at all, a dim shadow on dust, meaning nothing, saying nothing: and down there in the heat of this August day the festering wynds of Paldy Parish—

You closed the press and went down the stairs, out of the house, down Windmill Brae, idiot-angry to escape your soft self. Turning up to Royal Mile you went slower, wondering what you could do at this hour. A thin little gallop of Autumn rain came pelting down the street as you wondered, and you looked up and saw the Library near and beside it the Museum Galleries.

Inside there, breathing from running from the rain you debated a minute to stay or go out, the place as usual dingy and desolate, old chap in uniform yawning at a table. Then you went past him into the hall and stood and looked at the statues around, poor stuff the most of it, you’d seen it before.

Plaster-cast stuff of the Greek antiques, Discobolus, blowsily mammalian Venus, Pallas Athene—rather a dirty lot they had been, the Greeks, though so many clean things survived. Why did they never immortalize in stone a scene from the Athenian justice-courts—a slave being ritually, unnecessarily tortured before he could legally act as a witness? Or a baby exposed to die in a jar?—hundreds every year in the streets of Athens, it went on all day, the little kids wailing and crying and crying as the hot sun rose and they scorched in the jars; and then their mouths dried up, they just weeked and whimpered, they generally died by dark….

There was a cast of Trajan, good head; Cæsar—the Cæsar they said wasn’t Cæsar. Why not a head of Spartacus? Or a plaque of the dripping line of crosses that manned the Appian Way with slaves—dripping and falling to bits through long months, they took days to die, torn by wild beasts. Or a statuary group of a Roman slave being fed to fishes, alive, in a pool….