le. London has a fantastic look, as though
there were nothing to do but make haste to be gone. To look at London from
some point of height--a rare opportunity--is to trace these ways of
passionate escape. The roads, indeed, seem eager, but you know that the
crowds who, by these curves and knots, these straight lines, and these
intent, narrow, dark grey levels, traced with narrower steel, elude the
town, are in no more than jog-trot haste, and wear no look of fugitives.
Of them and of their detail there is no sign in this distant prospect. The
movement of the people in London is here no more perceptible than the
molecular motion in a diamond.

[Illustration: _A Coffee Stall._]

But the roads are all expressive of this energy of flight from a centre.
They are, as it were, signs of a perpetual explosion; they are the fringe
of the _melee_, the shooting, streaming outbreaks of the photosphere of
London. They hunt and are hunted. They fly from the city of confusion. It
is only by escaping that they become visible, and out of the uncertainty
of the smoke the hasty roads clear themselves as they make for light and
the open ground. It seems as though the steady strength of their curves
did in itself express some force and impulse. The railways run; their
foreshortened sweeps and reaches look like the swinging and swaying of
resolute motion. The town would shoulder them, but they evade and slip
through, slender and keen, with a stroke of their flying heels. They
crawl, but they crawl with the dominant level and liberty of flight in
air.

They begin in the tangle of the town, but smoothly untie themselves and
pass away single and swift. No other road looks so resolute in flight as
the rail. The others jostle one another as they hurry from town, and must
needs relax their eagerness in order to climb the hills--brief and little
ones though these are. The roads pause on the mounds, they hesitate at
crossways, and they dip into slight and shallow valleys, whence they do
not see the riot of walls and roofs from out of which they go.

The azure June hardly leaves a trace of the local grey of smoke. All, by
some accident of aspect, is a vague blue, although the smoke, seen from
the Greenwich heights, leaves nothing unveiled, cancels the horizon, and
barely lets the lovely dome of St. Paul's show a dark blue form upon the
close background of thick and sunny air. And blue, like the rest, is that
one wide road which takes here so ma