per.

From Fleet Street, the centre whence ideas flow outwards.

It is joyous to be in the flower-grown meads; it is sweet to be on the
hill-top; delicious to feel the swell and the long roll of the hexameter
of the seas; doubtless there is a wild rapture on the summit of the
Himalayas; triumph in the heart of the African explorer at the river's
source. But if once the mind has been dipped in Fleet Street, let the
meads be never so sweet, the mountain-top never so exalted, still to
Fleet Street the mind will return, because there is that other Mind,
without whose sympathy even success is nothing--the Mind of the world.

I am, of course, thinking not only of the thoroughfare, Fleet Street,
but of all that the printing-press means.

Alere was no leader of thought, but it was necessary to him to live and
breathe in the atmosphere of thought--to feel the throb and swell around
him--to be near the "grey matter" of the world's brain.

Once a man gets into Fleet Street he cannot get out. Flamma would not
leave it for months of gilded idleness in any nobleman's mansion.

The flame must be fed. His name had some connection with the design of
the Roman lamp on the splendid bindings of the books tooled in the House
of Flamma. _Alere Flammam_--feed the flame. The flame of the mind must
be fed.

Sad things happen on the stones of Fleet Street; if I could but get at
it all to write the inside life of it, it would, indeed, be a book.
Stone-cold poverty hovers about. The rich, living in the fool's paradise
of money, think they know life, but they do not, for, as was said of the
sea----

Only those who share its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.

Only those who have shared the struggle literally for bread--for a
real, actual loaf--understand the dread realities of man's existence.

Let but a morsel of wood--a little splinter of deal, a curl of
carpenter's shaving--lie in Fleet Street, and it draws to it the
wretched human beasts as surely as the offal draws the beast of the
desert to the camp. A morsel of wood in the streets that are paved with
gold!

It is so valuable. Women snatch it up and roll it in their aprons,
clasping it tightly, lest it should somehow disappear. Prowling about
from street to street, mile after mile, they fill their aprons with
these precious splinters of deal, for to those who are poor fuel is as
life itself.

Even the wealthy, if they have once been ill, especially of
blood