astern Railway, and
our train was half an hour late, stopping and going on and stopping
again. I marked beyond Chiselhurst the growing multitude of villas,
and so came stage by stage through multiplying houses and diminishing
interspaces of market garden and dingy grass to regions of interlacing
railway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of
dingy little homes, more of them and more and more. The number of these
and their dinginess and poverty increased, and here rose a great public
house and here a Board School and there a gaunt factory; and away to the
east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous forest of masts and
spars. The congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently into
tenements; I marveled more and more at this boundless world of dingy
people; whiffs of industrial smell, of leather, of brewing, drifted into
the carriage; the sky darkened, I rumbled thunderously over bridges,
van-crowded streets, peered down on and crossed the Thames with an
abrupt eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall warehouses, of grey
water, barge crowded, of broad banks of indescribable mud, and then
I was in Cannon Street Station--a monstrous dirty cavern with trains
packed across its vast floor and more porters standing along the
platform than I had ever been in my life before. I alighted with my
portmanteau and struggled along, realising for the first time just how
small and weak I could still upon occasion feel. In this world, I felt,
an Honours medal in Electricity and magnetism counted for nothing at
all.

Afterwards I drove in a cab down a canon of rushing street between high
warehouses, and peeped up astonished at the blackened greys of Saint
Paul's. The traffic of Cheapside--it was mostly in horse omnibuses in
those days--seemed stupendous, its roar was stupendous; I wondered where
the money came from to employ so many cabs, what industry could support
the endless jostling stream of silk-hatted, frock-coated, hurrying men.
Down a turning I found the Temperance Hotel Mr. Mantell had recommended
to me. The porter in a green uniform who took over my portmanteau,
seemed, I thought, to despise me a good deal.

V

Matriculation kept me for four full days and then came an afternoon
to spare, and I sought out Tottenham Court Road through a perplexing
network of various and crowded streets. But this London was vast! it was
endless! it seemed the whole world had changed into packed frontages and
ho