des, it sinks, it flies, it runs out of the
pocket. The nimble squirrel is nothing to the way in which a sovereign
will leap forth in town.

Raleigh had a good allowance, often supplemented by soft aunts, yet he
frequently walked for lack of a cab fare. _I_ can't blame him; I should
be just as bad, if fortune favoured me. How delicious now to walk down
Regent Street, along Piccadilly, up Bond Street, and so on, in a
widening circle, with a thousand pounds in one's pocket, just to spend,
all your own, and no need to worry when it was gone. To look in at all
the shops and pick up something here and something yonder, to say, "I'll
have that picture I admired ten years ago; I'll have a bit of real old
oak furniture; I'll go to Paris--" but Paris is not a patch on London.
To take a lady--_the_ lady--to St. Peter Robinson's, and spread the
silks of the earth before her feet, and see the awakening delight in her
eyes and the glow on her cheek; to buy a pony for the "kids" and a
diamond brooch for the kind, middle-aged matron who befriended you years
since in time of financial need; to get a new gun, and inquire about the
price of a deer-stalk in Scotland; whetting the road now and then with a
sip of Moet--but only one sip, for your liver's sake--just to brighten
up the imagination. And so onwards in a widening circle, as sun-lit
fancy led: could Xerxes, could great Pompey, could Caesar with all his
legions, could Lucullus with all his oysters, ever have enjoyed such
pleasure as this--just to spend money freely, with a jolly chuckle, in
the streets of London? What is Mahomet's Paradise to _that_?

The exquisite delight of utterly abandoned extravagance, no
counting--anathemas on counting and calculation! If life be not a dream,
what is the use of living?

Say what you will, the truth is, we all struggle on in hope of living in
a dream some day. This is my dream. Dreadfully, horribly wicked, is it
not, in an age that preaches thrift and--twaddle? No joy like waste in
London streets; happy waste, imaginative extravagance; to and fro like a
butterfly!

Besides, there's no entertainment in the world like the streets of
London on a sunny day or a gas-lit night. The shops, the carriages, the
people, the odds and ends of life one sees, the drifting to and fro of
folk, the "bits" of existence, glimpses into shadowy corners, the
dresses, the women; dear me, where shall we get to? At all events, the
fact remains that to anyone with a