any-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and
muffled, the tides of multitudinous traffic, sounding along their ways.
Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to
adventure out into that dangerous world again?

Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its
tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.

THE BEATIFIC VISION

Shoving and pushing, and shoved and pushed, a dishonoured bag of bones
about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the
clay beneath it, as I bump my head in a bus, or hang, half-suffocated;
from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists
and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world
that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.

One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem
for me; another unrolls a path of velvet to the enormous motor which
floats me, swift and silent, through the city traffic--I leaning back
like God on hallowed cushions, smoking a big cigar.

FACES

Almost always the streets are full of dreary-looking people; sometimes
for weeks on end the poor face-hunter returns unblest from his
expeditions, with no provision with which to replenish his
daydream-larder.

Then one day the plenty is all too great; there are Princesses at the
street-crossings, Queens in the taxi-cabs, Beings fair as the day-spring
on the tops of busses; and the Gods themselves can be seen promenading
up and down Piccadilly.

THE OBSERVER

Talk of ants! It's the precise habits, the incredible proceedings of
human insects I like to note and study.

Walking to-day, like a stranger dropped upon this planet, towards
Victoria, I chanced to see a female of this species, a certain Mrs.
Jones of my acquaintance, approaching from the opposite direction.
Immediately I found myself performing the oddest set of movements and
manoeuvres. I straightened my back and simpered, I lifted my hat in
the air; and then, seizing the paw of this female, I moved it up and
down several times, giving utterance to a set formula of articulated
sounds.

These anthropological gestures and vocalisations, and my automatic
performance of them, reminded me that it was after all from inside one
of them, that I was observing these Bipeds.

CHAOS

Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the
obvious world, a bit of Chaos