s; from the hill of Montmartre the electric lights here
and there give suggestive glimpses of the City of Pleasure. In Pekin,
looking across the lotus-pond and the marble bridges, all that is
squalid in the city is shrouded in a veil of foliage, and above the
tops of the trees only what is beautiful emerges, and the city sleeps
in the enjoyment of thoroughly Oriental repose; and, like a
solidly-built, healthy man, London sleeps soundly; but the strenuous,
restless activity of this city can hardly be said to sleep. I watched
it make an attempt at a pause for five minutes on the day of the
President's funeral. At an appointed time all the street traffic was
supposed to stand still. My! what an effort it was! It was not a real
pause; it seemed more like the gasping holding of the city's breath,
holding for these five minutes as if something were going to burst;
and then at the second when the clock marked the end of the five
minutes on went everything spinning with a feeling of absolute relief.
As one looks down from here one cannot help speculating as to what is
to be the future of what lies below. Is it going to be the greatest
city that the world has ever seen--in real greatness, or only in acute
development of material civilisation; and are the multitudes that
populate it going to get more happiness from the arcs of their little
lives than those of Carthage and Rome, or Pekin, or Babylon, or
London? Or are they going at the pace that kills? Or at least the pace
that tires into premature exhaustion?

But leaving these speculations, as it is now one o'clock, I get into
the cage of the elevator and drop down whirring as the floors toss
upwards beyond me--"Down twenty-eight," and we pull up with a jerk,
and a pale-faced man gets in. "Down twelve," and two tired-looking
women and a small boy get on board; and then the floor on which is a
newspaper office, and a crowd is waiting to descend. The paper is just
going to press, and their work is done. And then right down below the
level of the street I go to see the paper actually printed. Immense
rolls of paper are being lowered from the street level and handled as
easily as if they were of no more weight than a lead pencil, put
before machines which devour them to a deafening noise of machinery.
The room reminds one of the lower deck of an ironclad in action, and
the workers there seem fighting for their lives--fighting against
time, fighting against the machine, fighting agai