The Hypothetical Householder

We have read of some celebrated philosopher who was so absent-minded that
he paid a call at his own house. My own absent-mindedness is extreme, and
my philosophy, of course, is the marvel of men and angels. But I never
quite managed to be so absent-minded as that. Some yards at least from my
own door, something vaguely familiar has always caught my eye; and thus
the joke has been spoiled. Of course I have quite constantly walked into
another man's house, thinking it was my own house; my visits became almost
monotonous. But walking into my own house and thinking it was another
man's house is a flight of poetic detachment still beyond me. Something
of the sensations that such an absent-minded man must feel I really felt
the other day; and very pleasant sensations they were. The best parts of
every proper romance are the first chapter and the last chapter; and to
knock at a strange door and find a nice wife would be to concentrate the
beginning and end of all romance.

Mine was a milder and slighter experience, but its thrill was of the same
kind. For I strolled through a place I had imagined quite virgin and
unvisited (as far as I was concerned), and I suddenly found I was treading
in my own footprints, and the footprints were nearly twenty years old.

It was one of those stretches of country which always suggests an almost
unnatural decay; thickets and heaths that have grown out of what were once
great gardens. Garden flowers still grow there as wild flowers, as it
says in some good poetic couplet which I forget; and there is something
singularly romantic and disastrous about seeing things that were so long a
human property and care fighting for their own hand in the thicket. One
almost expects to find a decayed dog-kennel; with the dog evolved into a
wolf.

This desolate garden-land had been even in my youth scrappily planned out
for building. The half-built or empty houses had appeared quite
threateningly on the edge of this heath even when I walked over it years
ago and almost as a boy. I was astonished that the building had gone no
farther; I suppose somebody went bankrupt and somebody else disliked
building. But I remember, especially along one side of this tangle or
coppice, that there had once been a row of half-built houses. The brick
of which they were built was a sort of plain pink; everything else was a
blinding white; the houses smoked with white dust and white sawdust; and
on many of the windows were rubbed those round rough disks of white which
always delighted me as a child. They looked like the white eyes of some
blind giant.

I could see the crude, parched pink-and-white villas still; though I had
not thought at all of them for a quarter of my life; and had not thought
much of