



Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England




World's End
A Story in Three Books
By Richard Jefferies
Published by Tinsley Brothers, London.
This edition dated 1877.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER ONE.

BOOK ONE: FACTS.

It is not generally known that the mighty city of Stirmingham owes its
existence to a water-rat.  Stirmingham has a population of half a
million, and is the workshop of the earth.  It is a proud city, and its
press-men have traced its origin back into the dim vista of the past,
far before Alfred the Great's time, somewhere in the days of those
monarchs who came from Troy, and whose deeds Holinshed so minutely
chronicles.

But this is all trash and nonsense, and is a cunning device of the able
editors aforesaid, who confound--for their own purposes--the city proper
with the tiny hamlet of Wolf's Glow.  This little village or cluster of
houses, which now forms a part, and the dirtiest part, of the city, can
indeed be traced through Hundred Rolls, Domesday Book, and Saxon
Charters, almost down to the time of the Romans.  But Stirmingham, the
prosperous and proud Stirmingham, which thinks that the world could not
exist without its watches and guns, its plated goods, its monster
factories and mills, which sends cargoes to Timbuctoo, and supplies Java
and Malabar with idols--this vast place, whose nickname is a by-word for
cheating, for fair outward show and no real solidity, owes its existence
to a water-rat.  This is a fact.  And it happened in this way.

Once upon a time there