little more than something we had heard named, they were
but the scenery close to the buses. Yet London was more wonderful than
anything they could make it appear. About Fenchurch Street and
Leadenhall Street wagons could be seen going east, bearing bales and
cases, and the packages were port-marked for Sourabaya, Para, Ilo-Ilo,
and Santos--names like those. They had to be seen to be believed. You
could stand there, forced to think that the sun never did more than
make the floor of asphalted streets glow like polished brass, and that
the evening light was full of glittering motes and smelt of dust, and
that life worked itself out in cupboards made of glass and mahogany;
and suddenly you learned, while smelling the dust, that Acapulco was
more than a portent in a book and held only by an act of faith. Yet
that astonishing revelation, enough to make any youthful messenger
forget where he himself was bound, through turning to follow with his
eyes that acceptance by a carrier's cart of the verity of the fable, is
nowhere mentioned, I have found since, in any guide to London, though
you may learn how Cornhill got its name.

For though Londoners understand the Guildhall pigeons have as much
right to the place as the aldermen, they look upon the seabirds by
London Bridge as vagrant strangers. They do not know where their city
ends on the east side. Their River descends from Oxford in more than
one sense. It has little history worth mentioning below Westminster.
To the poets, the River becomes flat and songless where at Richmond the
sea's remote influence just moves it; and there they leave it. The
Thames goes down then to a wide grey vacuity, a featureless monotony
where men but toil, where life becomes silent in effort, and goes out
through fogs to nowhere in particular. But there is a hill-top at
Woolwich from which, better than from Richmond, our River, the
burden-bearer, the road which joins us to New York and Sydney, can be
seen for what it is, plainly related to a vaster world, with the ships
upon its bright path moving through the smoke and buildings of the
City. And surely some surmise of what our River is comes to a few of
that multitude who cross London Bridge every day? They favour the east
side of it, I have noticed, and they cannot always resist a pause to
stare overside to the Pool. Why do they? Ships are there, it is true,
but only insignificant traders, diminished by sombre cliffs up which
their