d in the money-making by the mud
and rain. We passed a little square carpeted with fresh grass, but the
trees on the other side were vague in mist, and the square and its
vegetation gave the suggestion of a tank with seaweeds in it. It was a
day for studying men and women by their umbrellas and boots. Boots
tell confessions for the most Low Church Protestants, and the
umbrellas above them generally corroborate the sins of the boots.

My Oriental friend was gazing out gravely.

It was on a warm evening in a tea-garden that he had talked about his
coming visit to London. I recollect his enthusing over the phrase

"Beneath the rule of men supremely great
The pen is mightier than the sword."

A great motto for a great country, he then said it was. He professed
an anxiety to see or meet some of the great English writers, our
_literati_, as he called them. He liked the honesty of Englishmen in
business, and wanted to see them at work. He had helped to show me
something of the life of the East--that part of the life most
difficult to see, the life of the home--and in return I promised to
show him something of the life of the West, how and where people work
and play, and pray--when they do so.

"Show me the house of one of your _literati_ if we pass one," he said.
"Is that one, there?" pointing to a gorgeous public-house, as we
passed a street corner.

I saw the probable toppling of an ideal. We passed a couple of
quick-driving vans with a green placard of an evening paper, and I
explained to him what a reading public we were, and how many editions
of the papers were quickly distributed during the afternoon, how the
appetite for them had grown, like the craving for cheap cigarettes, as
a relief from being obliged to inhale pure literary air. The
newspaper habit and the cigarette habit are about on a par after all.

[Illustration: Hospital Train Leaving Ladysmith For Pietermaritzburg.]

We passed a church with closed doors, and he seemed surprised. I
explained to him that the churches were open on Sunday, on which day
the more numerous temples of Bacchus were closed for a while.

We reached the Strand, where he was greatly interested in a line of
'buses. "Have you no street cars like in New York?" I submitted that
these were kept on chiefly in order to have a supply of artillery
horses in times of war.

"And have you no high buildings either?"

The explanation of ancient lights and the overhead space wasted in