day. Each little knot sorts itself-cigars and white skirts and stockings opposite the saloon bar, clays and shawls and Jack and Tommy opposite the public, jugs and bottles in their appointed place. The long hand crawls slowly over the five minutes mark; now it is more than half-way to the hour. The loll of elaborate unconsciousness which first screened the waiters gives place to the tense pose of listening. A footstep inside and the raising of a bolt-the door rolls back with a glimpse of somebody in white shirt-sleeves. There is no affectation of uncertainty: every man goes straight forward inside, as ships glide into port. In a twinkling the houses are all full, and before the last man is well in the first comes out wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

74

X.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF DIRT.

You might think of a dozen or a hundred bases of distinction between London and other capitals; but you will always come back in the end to the one that struck you first-dirt. London is beyond comparison the dirtiest capital in the world. We suppose ourselves personally the cleanest people in the world, and so we are. But we need not boast; we are clean only in self-defence, because the city we live in is so immitigably grimy. We allege that London is a sanitary place, well-drained, with a low death-rate. So, for aught I know, it may be, though the looks of its inhabitants belie the statement. But, wholesome or not, it remains filthy-dusty, muddy, sooty, smoky, evil-smelling, sunless at noonday- filthy beyond the filthiness of the rottenest plague-spot in the East. It is the first thing that the arriving foreigner observes, the last thing that the returning Londoner forgets. This is not for want of gallant efforts to clean

it; but foul London remains. Foul, moreover, it always will be until somebody invents and enforces a practicable method of consuming smoke. Five million people, when you think of it, must needs produce smoke enough to blacken the sun like a copper kettle. The sun and the air and the trees and the river and, not content with these, London blackens itself most impartially. Did you ever look out from a railway train over Southwark or Bermondsey those symphonies in smudge? On the intensest summer day the sky is never more than bluish under it the landscape is a smoke - grey monotone of low chimneys and house-tops broken only by outcropping smoke - and - reddish board schools. All shapes, all light, all colour you see through a curtain of fine soot. You see it better here than elsewhere only because here the low houses permit a wider prospect; the colour hardly varies over the whole of London. Yet by a happy irony this very soot-veil is the only begetter of London's beauties. It tones down jarring colours and softens crude outlines. Everywhere it palliates. ugliness, but along the river it creates loveliness. Here also is space to see its magic. At dawn it reinforces the mist, at sunset it plays the part of cloud. At every hour of day and night it blends, relieves, and graduates ugliness into unerring harmonies of delight.

The Thames is beautiful up-river from London Bridge, but down-river it is also grand. Start from Old Swan Pier and steam down as far as Greenwich. Here at the very beginning is an epitome of the greatness of London. Above you on the left rises London Bridge-the road: gently rounded arches, monumental granite, omnibuses and vans gliding past above the parapet in an endless succession. On the right is Cannon Street bridge-the rail: level surface and upright piers, clanking iron, half-a-dozen great engines snorting on the track at a time. Behind and before you rise warehouses in spreading, precipitous cliff-line. And at your feet swirls mightily the Thames, fouled with a thousand impurities, broken into eddies and billows by a thousand rushing tugs, bearing on the same strong fatherly bosom both London's offscourings and London's treasure.

As soon as you have come near to rapture at the noise, the energy, the wealth and power within your gaze, there pants up to receive you the penny steamer. Your dilating soul contracts in a second to dry sponge. And is this also London? This ramshackle cockle-shell-is this London's best thanks for the gifts of Father Thames? . . . But forget, if the knife-board seats and the showering smuts will let you, the penny steamer; for we enter the Pool of London. The Tower Bridge has spoiled

it a little to my mind-not merely by its own. intrinsic hideousness, by its disproportion to its surroundings, and the tawdry, castellated affectations that make it look as if it were jealous of the Tower-but also because it breaks the wonderful transformation from the river above London Bridge to the ocean-stream below it. Yet even with the Tower Bridge how great, how romantically suggestive, how soul-expanding is the Pool of London!

Under the suffusing blend of smoke and sunshine, compact yet open, it displays its riches, yet keeps a halo of mystery. The long and seemly face of the Custom House imposes order, the stark stone of the Traitors' Gate and Bloody Tower epitomises the romance of London's past. The stout ships are eloquent of the romance of the present, panting and creaking, discharging the wealth of the Indies and the River Plate, gliding proudly up stream unwearied by numberless leagues through strange waters, stealing softly down the dwindling vista of wharves to tempt fortune in humming ports over the vast expanses beyond. The very line of wharves, the cliffs of the southern shore, are loud with challenge to the fancy. Here are buildings, parts of London, full of Londoners, yet how many of us know as much as the way into them? They look towards the river, and are a part of it. With their many decks, long lines of halfdeadened, fast-closed windows, open doors on every