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For now had come that moment, that crisis, in the when if a
feather alight in one scale, it will be weighted down - & so if
if a feather had blown alighted the house would have fallen in:
would have become past repair; & out picnickers, would have
boiled their kettles in its cr ruined rooms, lovers [?]
sought shelter there, or som the shepherd stored his dinner, &
taken his rest there, with his collie& by his side. Then
even the the walls would have fallen in, & then, coming over
the hill, only the since the tangled garden could nothing would have what would have
remained to one straying into this wilderness, this ruined barn,
(for such it seemed) in a wilderness of old unkempt shrubs,
some the only things [?] which would have testified that here
people had lived somewhere about here would have been
the extraordinary apparition of a red hot poker;87 The a chipped plate.
If the feather had fallen, - if it had plunged the scale into
darkness, - but there was a force working on the other side;
something leering & lurching; something that wassomething not highly conscious of its
own purpose, & certainly not inspired to go about its task with
dignified ritual or solemn chanting. But in old Maggie & her
crony, Mrs. Bast, there was a force: (they came with their
brooms & their pails, they moaned: they crooned. They got to work.)
There was a force perhaps in their craziness, ( for without being
locked in danger of locking up, their minds were blank,88
or vacancy of mind ask them what
 the war had
 been about -
did they know?)89 which slowly & painfully began
stayed the corruption & the rot; rescued from the
pool of time which was fast closing over them, now a bed now a
basin now a cupboard; fished up from oblivion the
all the Waverley novels, & a tea pot one morning: in the
afternoon restored to the sun & the air a brass fender & a
set of steel pokers & tongs.       Some rusted laborious birth
attended with the creaking hinges & the screeching of bolts &

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