about 5 A.M.
I went down , and after eating , and drinking some clary-water , made of brandy , sugar , cinnamon , and rose water , which I found in plenty , I lay down on a sofa in the inner hall , and slept a quiet sleep until near midnight . I went out then , still possessed with the foolish greed to reach London , and after getting the engine to rights , went off under a clear black sky thronged with worlds and far-sown spawn , some of them , I thought , perhaps like this of mine , whelmed and drowned in oceans of silence , with one only inhabitant to see it , and hear its silence . And all the long night I travelled , stopping twice only , once to get the coal from an engine which had impeded me , and once to drink some water , which I took care , as always , should be running water . When I felt my head nod , and my eyes close about 5 A.M. , I threw myself , just outside the arch of a tunnel upon a grassy bank , pretty thick with stalks and flowers , the workings of early dawn being then in the east : and there , till near eleven , slept . On waking , I noticed that the country now seemed more like Surrey than Kent : there was that regular swell and sinking of the land ; but , in fact , though it must have been either , it looked like neither , for already all had an aspect of return to a state of wild nature , and I could see that for a year at the least no hand had tended the soil . Near before me was a stretch of lucerne of such extraordinary growth , that I was led during that day and the succeeding one to examine the condition of vegetation with some minuteness , and nearly everywhere I detected a certain hypertrophie tendency in stamens , calycles , pericarps , and pistils , in every sort of bulbiferous growth that I looked at , in the rushes , above all , the fronds , mosses , lichens , and all cryptogamia , and in the trefoils , clover especially , and some creepers . Many crop-fields , it was clear , had been prepared , but not sown ; some had not been reaped : and in both cases I was struck with their appearance of rankness , as I was also when in Norway , and was all the more surprised that this should be the case at a time when a poison , whose action is the arrest of oxidation , had traversed the earth ; I could only conclude that its presence in large volumes in the lower strata of the atmosphere had been more or less temporary , and that the tendency to exuberance which I observed was due to some principle by which Nature acts with freer energy and larger scope in the absence of man .