PICTURE: BellStones]

I glance down at the stones, small oblongs, with which the terrace is paved. The general colour of them all is pale grey. (They are of the local stone called Blue Lias.) Yet the longer I look at them, the more they become differentiated into bluish stones and yellowish stones. (Longer still, and some of the bluish ones even seem to become purplish.) If you were to see any one of them in isolation, it would be just pale grey, but their proximity to each other brings out the slight contrasts. This is a phenomenon that will be recognized by astronomy-enthusiasts who "split" double stars with their telescopes: the two close-together components of the star Albireo make each other look quite sharply blue and yellow, though they're really, like all stars, very close to white.

Another thing about the stones: they are laid end to end in rows, and each row has a different width. Whoever laid them must, before starting a row, have selected enough stones of identical width.

They were laid perhaps thirty years ago. When you use this stone, you have to cut it with grain a certain way or it will crumble sooner. Some of these are beginning to crumble, to the concern of Mr. Pelly of the art shop, but no authority seems to admit responsibility for repairing them.