The Square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of moonlight.
The garland of lights at the foot of the houses seemed to burn at the
bottom of a bluish pool. I noticed with infinite satisfaction that the
unnecessary trees the Municipality insisted upon sticking between the
stones had been steadily refusing to grow. They were not a bit bigger
than the poor victims I could remember. Also, the paving operations
seemed to be exactly at the same point at which I left them forty years
before. There were the dull, torn-up patches on that bright expanse, the
piles of paving material looking ominously black, like heads of rocks on
a silvery sea. Who was it that said that Time works wonders? What an
exploded superstition! As far as these trees and these paving stones
were concerned, it had worked nothing. The suspicion of the
unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to my senses by our
rapid drive from the railway station was agreeably strengthened within
me.
"We are now on the line A.B.," I said to my companion, importantly.
It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the Square by
the senior students of that town of classical learning and historical
relics.
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