close, and the mighty city lay buried in the deepest silence, unbroken, save by the occasional tramp of the 'Nocturnal Triumviri,' as they passed on their roundsor perhaps by the footsteps of one lounging homewards from a late debauch." There is nothing new, you see, under the sun, save humour and woman. Now I was not 'lounging homewards from a late debauch,' but was out on a voyage of discovery and observation. I had conceived the idea, like Gallus, of seeing what the city looked like by night. A book, I believe, has lately been written on that subject, but as to whether it is written in prose, or whether in verse, or by whom it is written, or at how much it is sold, or if, having read it, one would be pleased, it is not for me, not knowing, as Herodotus might say, to offer an opinion among those who doubtless do. With the afore-mentioned end in view I passed along the empty mysterious streets, and ghostly footsteps rang on the wet pavement behind me, "a hollow echo of my own." Somewhere in the city I came upon a very cold and impecunious old lady leaning against a door in the shadow of a porch; apparently quite hopeless and benumbed into indifference. I asked her if she had no one to go to, no one to look after her: "No, no," moaned the cracked old voice. I said I was in the same condition myself, and put a small contribution into her lean and ghastly palm protruded from beneath the ragged shawl; then, with the croak of her disproportionate blessings still in my ears, I passed away into the nevermore with a vague regret that I was not a workhouse, or even a cab-driver. After continuing this healthy and meditative form of exercise for some hours, during which I seemed to traverse most of the principal thoroughfares of the town, and feeling tired and by no means fastidious, I chanced upon a coffee-stall on the further side of London Bridge. I was not aware at the time that I was in that locality, but suddenly saw the break in the buildings, and the regular lines of twinkling lights, and in between the stealthy river swirling quietly, with great floes of ice swimming upon it-for the frost had just broken-and grating slowly under the dark echoing arches. I leant over the parapet with one knee on the stone seat, and felt sentimental: thought of Hood's Bridge of Sighs, and weighed the advantages and disadvantages of suicide, deciding finally to postpone it for the present. I thought of Wordsworth's sonnet: The river glideth at his own sweet will: It certainly was an impressive sight. I went up to the coffee-stall and had a cup, which possessed the superlative merit of heat, if no other: I also obtained for one penny a slab of cake about the size of a small Genoa. These delicacies having been consumed, and some light badinage, or yeдupioμós, exchanged with the keeper of the stall, I fared forward with the dim idea of testing the hospitality of the College Mission; but not being perfectly confident of the address of that institution, or my own geographical position with regard to it, I eventually returned to "Lum Brigsh," as it has been termed, and asked the coffee man tentatively if there was anywhere where I could sit down. He replied in the affirmative, and before long I found myself reclining on a wooden box, with two other salutatores, or morning callers (parasites, apparently, of the coffee man, who was a comparative 'toff' in their opinion), and a small but dirty boy. We sat round a bucket-fire and smoked: a sackcloth curtain forming a kind of half-tent kept out the bitter East, or it may have been the bitter North, at our backs, and the coffee-stall combated the draught in front. The coffee man worked the engines. Some hours we sat and discussed the ways of the world round the bucket-fire, much as one does in one's college rooms. My companions were very pleasant and communicative, and much more deserving of respect, it struck me, if not of imitation, than many upon whom Fortune casts brighter smiles. Life meant something to them, the life of the moment they took no thought of the morrow, etc.: the to-day was too real, too inevitably absorbing, and more than enough to claim their whole attention. I learnt a lot, much more than I can ever remember or relate, about their ways of life and aims and purposes: the odd jobs they did, how they slept at workhouses (not at the same one twice a month under pain of extra work), or got taken up on purpose to get a night's rest. Selling matches was the best business, they said: you could get a dozen boxes for 5d. or 6d. (the 5d. ones were really just as good) and make half profits. Their notions of a good day's business, a good night's rest, or a good square meal, made me feel absolutely ashamed of the comforts that fall undeservedly to my lot, and to yours, my complacent reader. But, as Mr Gallienne tells us, we have discovered the Relative Spirit of social and other philosophy: lower pleasures, lower pains, and the rest of it. Have we discovered, may I ask, relative hunger and thirst? Do people require less clothing the less they have to eat? One of my friends was a sailor, or rather a stoker, and had been to many parts of the world, of all of which he had something to say. "A good traveller," as the national bard has it, "is something at the latter end of a dinner," and I found him also most interesting company at the latter end of London Bridge, although dressed in ragged clothes, unshaven, and smoking an unprepossessing clay. He was a man, however, Qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes -a man of large experience, if of little refinement, with a gleam of genuine kindliness in his eye. Though these words may never reach the eyes of those to whom they relate, I must say that that night, if one of the strangest, was at the same time one of the pleasantest and most instructive I ever spent. On such occasions one lives weeks of ordinary humdrum life. At about 4 a.m. the sailor and I took a walk as far as the Elephant and Castle and back, and we exchanged pipes by way of a memento of the evening. At 5 a m. in London "the noise of life begins anew," whether the blank day has broken on the bald street or not: carts go to market and men go to work, and call at the night coffee-stalls for their breakfast. Stray pedestrians, and the Nocturnal Triumviri,' of course, are about all night, but at 5 o'clock there is quite a sudden ebb of re-awakening life. The thing that struck me most of all in the men I met was their cheeriness and good humour: taking life as it came with no grumbling or cultured pessimism, and making the best of it: with very great capacities for humour and sympathy and charity. Toynbee Hall and similar settlements may be all very well, as blind and uncertain steps towards fusion of the classes-narrow planks, as it were, across the chasm between the rich and poor-for people with cool heads and strong knees (which may mean anything you like to make it); but for complete and practical bridging over the gulf commend me to London Bridge, and its night coffee-stall and bucket-fire. C. E. B. SATOR SARTORQUE SCELERUM. SING, Muse, a curse on that sartorial sot, Whose treacherous crime hath wrought my bitter woe. May he upon his table ever squat Bent, cramped, and bowed, nor change of posture know. Through the whole scale of fierce invective go! Sing rhythmic strains of bitterest abuse! O may he reap the evil he doth sow, Of clumsy fingers may he lack the use, And burn his caitiff hands with overheated goose! Wherefore, ye ask, revile so base a wight! Through vile default of him and his machine. And when I meet her (ah! what might have been!) Unto her dainty mouth, and laughs until she cries. She was an angel in a mortal frame: I loved her madly, yet with jealous smart, For other lover did the very same, Nor could she settle which possessed her heart. To deck my person: soon the suit was made; In burning words my love did I explain; |