e usual rejoicings within.

"It was an 'Atlas' omnibus, and it took me to Piccadilly Circus, and that
being the wrong direction, I had to change. But a fog had come down in
the meanwhile, and lo, there I was in the middle of it!

"O Ananias, Azarias, and Misael! Do you know what a London fog is? It's
smoke, it's soot, it's sulphur. It is darker than night, for it
extinguishes the lights, and denser than the mist on the Curragh, and
filthier than the fumes of the brick-kiln. It makes you think the whole
round earth must be a piggery copper and that London has lifted the lid
off. In the midst of this inferno the cabs crawl and the 'buses creep,
and foul fiends, who turn out to be men merely, go flitting about with
torches, and you grope and croak and cough, and the most innocent faces
come puffing and snorting down on you like the beasts in the Apocalypse.

"I thought it good fun at first, but presently I could only keep from
crying by having a good laugh, and I was doing that, and asking somebody
the way to the Holborn omnibus, when a policeman pushed me and said:
'Come, move on; none of yer lyterin' abart here!'

"I could have choked, but remembering something I had seen on that very
spot on the night of my first day out, I dived across the street and ran
in spite of curses and collisions. But the 'somebody,' whoever he was,
had followed me, and he put me into the right 'bus, so I got here at
last. It took two mortal hours to do it, and after that spell of
purgatory this house is like a blessed paradise, peopled with angels of
mercy and grace, as paradise ought to be.

"The good Samaritan was very kind, and she made tea for me in a twinkling
and slaughtered the fatted calf in the shape of a pot of raspberry jam.
Her name is Mrs. Jupe, and her husband is something in a club, and she
has one child of eleven, whose bedfellow I am to be, and here I am now
with Miss Slyboots in our little bedroom feeling safe and sound and
monarch of all I survey.

"Good-night, good people! Half an hour hence I'll be going through a mad
march of the incidents of the day, turned topsy-turvy according to the
way of dreams. But wae's me! wae's me! If it had all been true--if I had
been really homeless and friendless and penniless, instead of having
three 'goolden' pounds in my purse, and Providence in the person of Mrs.
Jupe, to fall back upon! When I grow to be a wonderful woman and have
brought the eyes of all the earth upon me, I am goi