Many things which once loomed very large before him sank to insignificance as he drank to the full of the desolation around him.

The past, in which no doubt men strove and hoped, hated and loved and feared, had left the just recognisable ruins of some castles and the causeway built by an unknown hermit or the prehistoric lake-dwellers.
A few thatched cabins, faintly smoking, and here and there a cairn of stones gathered laboriously off the wretched fields, were the evidences of present activity.

Now and then a man hooted to his dog as it barked at the sheep on the hillside, or a girl drove a turf-laden donkey inland from the boggy shore.

Otherwise there were no signs of human life.

A deep sense of monotony and inevitableness settled down upon Hyacinth.