his
many-sided, demanding London, which makes a claim unknown to any other
city of the earth save Rome. But there is a certain justification in
lingering at points where women and children congregate, since their
life also is part of the quest, and nowhere can it better be seen than
in and about Covent Garden Market,--a thousand thoughts arising as the
old square is entered from whatever point.

It is not alone the first days of the pilgrim's wanderings in London
that are filled with the curious sense of home coming that makes up the
consciousness of many an American. It is as if an old story were told
again, and the heir, stolen in childhood, returned, unrecognized by
those about him, but recalling with more and more freshness and
certainty the scenes of which he was once a part. The years slip away.
Two hundred and more of them lie between, it is true; but not two
hundred nor ten times two hundred can blot out the lines of a record in
which the struggle and the hope of all English-speaking people was one.
For past or present alike, London stands as the fountain-head; and thus,
whatever pain may come from the oppressive sense of crowded, swarming
life pent up in these dull gray walls, whatever conviction that such a
monster mass of human energy and human pain needs diffusion and not
concentration, London holds and will hold a fascination that is quite
apart from any outward aspect.

To go to a point determined upon beforehand is good. To lose oneself in
the labyrinth of lanes and alleys and come suddenly upon something quite
as desirable, is even better; and this losing is as inevitable as the
finding also becomes. The first perplexity arises from the fact that a
London street is "everything by turns and nothing long," and that a
solitary block of buildings owns often a name as long as itself. The
line of street which, on the map, appears continuous, gives a dozen
changes to the mile, and the pilgrim discovers quickly that he is always
somewhere else than at or on the point determined upon. Then the
temptation to add to this complication by sudden excursions into shadowy
courts and dark little passages is irresistible, not to mention the
desire, equally pressing, of discovering at once if Violet Lane and Hop
Vine Alley and Myrtle Court have really any relation to their names, or
are simply the reaching out of their inhabitants for some touch of
Nature's benefactions. Violet Lane may have had its hedgerows and
violets