that more westerly arch
which celebrates Waterloo, there to sniff and immerse myself in the
town. The hour is 8:15 _post meridien_ and the time is early summer. I
have just rolled down Wellington Street from the Strand, smoking a
ninepence Vuelta Abajo, humming an ancient air. One of Simpson's
incomparable English dinners--salmon with lobster sauce, a cut from the
joint, two vegetables, a cress salad, a slice of old Stilton and a mug
of bitter--has lost itself, amazed and enchanted, in my interminable
recesses. My board is paid at Morley's. I have some thirty-eight dollars
to my credit at Brown's, a ticket home is sewn to my lingerie, there is
a friendly jingle of shillings and sixpences in my pocket. The stone
coping invites; I lay myself against it, fold my arms, blow a smoke ring
toward the sunset, and give up my soul to recondite and mellow
meditation.

There are thirteen great bridges between Fulham Palace and the Isle of
Dogs, and I have been at pains to try every one of them; but the best of
all, for such needs as overtake a well fed and ruminative man on a
summer evening, is that of Waterloo. Look westward and the towers of St.
Stephen's are floating in the haze, a greenish slate colour with edges
of peroxide yellow and seashell pink. Look eastward and the fine old
dome of St. Paul's is slipping softly into greasy shadows. Look downward
and the river throws back its innumerable hues--all the coal tar dyes
plus all the duns and drabs of Thames mud. The tide is out and along the
south bank a score of squat barges are high and dry upon the flats.
Opposite, on the embankment, the lights are beginning to blink, and from
the little hollow behind Charing Cross comes the faint, far-away braying
of a brass band.

All bands are in tune at four hundred yards, the reason whereof you
must not ask me now. This one plays a melody I do not know, a melody
plaintive and ingratiating, of clarinet arpeggios all compact. Some lay
of amour, I venture, breathing the hot passion of the Viennese Jew who
wrote it. But so heard, filtered through that golden haze, echoed back
from that lovely panorama of stone and water, all flavour of human
frailty has been taken out of it. There is, indeed, something wholly
chastening and dephlogisticating in the scene, something which makes the
joys and tumults of the flesh seem trivial and debasing. A man must be
fed, of course, to yield himself to the suggestion, for hunger is
frankly a brute; but o