doubtful purchaser to their stalls, pressed baby linen irresistibly on the bachelor. They were never still and never silent. They met refusal with insistence, excuse with repartee. They were never at a loss, never disconcerted, and for an extra guinea would fasten your carnation into your buttonhole themselves. And I wonder what their grandmothers would have said to that.

At one stall I saw two natives of India, brown, bottomless-eyed creatures, with a sort of self-contained pride in their most obeisant demeanour. And, ye gods, what were they thinking of it all? I tried to imagine a Maharajah selling attar and betel-nut or a Begum hawking lotuses. I moved away from the neighbourhood, and wished that whoever had brought those natives of a dignified country had left them at home.

Rank and beauty auctioning itself to impertinent curiosity-but in the cause of charity. Still you could not expect the Indians to take count of that. Indeed, once that is said, could you expect the inhabitants of any well-ordered city to take count of it? Consider. Here are the hospitals of London—an absolute necessity to a civilised city. On them depends the education of our physicians and surgeons; we cannot possibly do without them. The hospitals afford the only relief in grave sickness to the very poor, the best relief to everybody. And not a single

patient in most of them ever pays a fee, and all of them but two are dependent for their existence on charity.

Then they are starved?

If you told these things to an intelligent stranger from India he would laugh at you. This the greatest city in the world, and it leaves its greatest need to chance? Are the patients grateful? he would ask. No, you would have to reply; they look on the care they get as their right. Is it good for them to do that? No, you would have to say; it would be better for them to pay, if only a penny a-week. Are the hospitals very rich? On the contrary, they are nearly all nearly always in debt. They are starved, and yet, relying on outbursts of charity, they sometimes launch out into reckless and unnecessary expenditure. Then your hospital system, the intelligent Indian might be moved to remark, is a combination of pauperism and mendicancy. It is a combination of pauperism and mendicancy, you would have to reply, but it is not a system. worthy of the greatest city in the world? tainly would not be found anywhere else.

Is it

It cer

The dialogue would leave you humiliated, but it would help the Indian to understand the Albert Hall. He would enjoy himself vastly, observing our way of maintaining hospitals. He would reflect that the preparation of the floor alone cost £1000, without mentioning the decorations and the band and the

value of the time of the singers and actors, and of the assistants, which perhaps is the lightest item. He might overhear one beauty asking another the price of a glove-box, and the reply, "It's marked one pound five, but you can have it for the five without the pound." He might notice towards the end of the evening towels of the finest quality selling for ten shillings a dozen, and hats from Paris going for half-a-crown, because the purchaser had not three shillings.

His philosophic mind might arrive at the conclusion that the hospital would have benefited more if everybody had given cash instead of goods or time or decorations. "But then," he would soliloquise, "I should have missed the pleasure of seeing how idle and indecorous is this thing they call London Society."

E

66

IX.

THE VARIOUS ASPECTS OF A MODERN SUNDAY.

I WAS privileged the other day to see a Frenchman land in London for the first time at Holborn Station, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Laden with hand luggage, he struggled out on to the Viaduct; of course, there was no cab. He looked eagerly for his first sight of London-then checked and stared, with blank eyes and open mouth. It was plain that he half-wondered whether he had not gone mad. Well he might. He had probably heard stories of the roaring rush and energy of London, which strikes a Parisian much as a Londoner is struck in turn by New York. And he saw a desolation. Nothing but the blind shop-windows, the silent house-fronts, the empty asphalt of Holborn Viaduct. Not a face at a

window, not an open door, not a footstep along the street. The one dwindling omnibus towards the Circus might be the last vehicle carrying away the last inhabitants of London. The City might have

been utterly empty -- only lifeless buildings left standing, and all population fled or dead.

The City on Sunday had never struck me as strange before. But a moment from the foreigner's point of view and you see that it is among the wonders of the world. There is nothing in the least like it in this hemisphere. Go into any other capital on Sunday-even at the height of the summer's suburban excursions—and it is fuller, brighter, livelier than in the week. Go into the heart of London, and it is like a city stricken with a pestilence. Yesterday and to-morrow the street would be jammed tight with traffic of men and goods; every shop and office implied a procession of comers and goers, the pavements vomited torrents of people, heads forward, eyes strained, intent only on the one business. The City roared and quivered and maddened with life. Tomorrow it will be so again. To-day, in the centre of the greatest city in the world, you cannot buy food or drink you cannot even find a cab or train to take you away from it. You might be in a desert. In a street that focusses the business of the world you stare at closed doors and still windows where only paper-clad boxes of samples look over the whitened lower half at the intruder. You can stand without a single living thing in sight, and bend your ears in vain to catch the lightest sound. When you walk, your boots thud and ring like a steamer's engines;