and the things they pray to and curse and worship and
swindle in! It is like being out in the middle of a great ocean of
living, or like climbing up some great mountain-height of people, their
abysses and their clouds about them, their precipices and jungles and
heavens, the great high roads of their souls reaching off.... I can
never say why, but so strange is it, so full of awe is it, and of
splendour and pity, that there are times when, rolling and swinging
along on top of a 'bus, with all this strange, fearful joy of life about
me, within me ... it is as if on top of my 'bus I had been far away in
some infinite place, and had felt Heaven and Hell sweep past.

One of the first things that strikes an American when he slips over from
New York, and finds himself, almost before he had thought of it--walking
down the Strand, suddenly, instead of Broadway, is the way
things--thousands of things at once; begin happening to him.

Of course, with all the things that are happening to him--the 'buses,
the taxis, the Wren steeples, the great streams of new sights in the
streets, the things that happen to his eyes and to his ears, to his feet
and his hands, and to his body lunging through the ground and swimming
up in space on top of a 'bus through this huge, glorious, yellow mist of
people ... there are all the things besides that begin happening to his
mind.

In New York, of course, he rushes along through the city, in a kind of
tunnel of his own thoughts, of his own affairs, and drives on to his
point, and New York does not--at least it does not very often--make
things happen to his mind. He is not in London five minutes before he
begins to notice how London does his thinking for him. The streets of
the city set him to thinking, mile after mile, miles of comparing, miles
of expecting.

And above the streets that he walks through and drives through he finds
in London another complete set of streets that interest him: the
greater, silenter streets of England--the streets of people's thoughts.
And he reads the great newspapers, those huge highways on which the
English people are really going somewhere.... "_Where are they going?_"
He goes through the editorials, he stumbles through the news, "_Where
are the English people going?_"

* * * * *

An American thinks of the English people in the third person--at first,
of course.

After three days or so, he begins, half-unconsciously, slipping ov