e
escape,--that Borough Road on which the Canterbury Pilgrims rode out on
a morning less complicated, it is certain, by fog and mist and smoke and
soot than mornings that dawn for this generation. Every foot of the way
is history; the old Tower at one's back, and the past as alive as the
present. "Merrie England" was at its best, they say, when the pages we
know were making; but here as elsewhere, the name is a tradition,
belied by every fact of the present.

The old inns along the way still hold their promise of good cheer, and
the great kitchens and tap-rooms have seen wild revelry enough; but even
for them has been the sight of political or other martyr done to death
in their court-yards, while no foot of playground, no matter how much
the people's own, but has been steeped in blood and watered with tears
of English matron and maid. If "Merrie England" deserved its name, it
must have come from a determination as fixed as Mark Tapley's, to be
jolly under any and all circumstances, and certainly circumstances have
done their best to favor such resolution. The peasant of the past,
usually represented as dancing heavily about a Maypole, or gazing
contentedly at some procession of his lords and masters as it swept by,
has no counterpart to-day, nor will his like come again. For here about
the old Borough, where every stone means history and the "making of the
English people," there are faces of all types that England holds, but no
face yet seen carries any sense of merriment, or any good thing that
might bear its name. It is the burden of living that looks from dull
eyes and stolid faces, and a hopelessness, unconscious it may be but
always apparent, that better things may come. The typical Englishman, as
we know him, has but occasional place, and the mass, hurrying to and fro
in the midst of this roar of traffic, are thin and eager and restless of
countenance as any crowd of Americans in the same type of surroundings.
Innumerable little streets, each dingier and more sordid than the last,
open on either side. Hot coffee and cocoa cans are at every corner,
their shining brass presided over by men chiefly. Here, as throughout
East London, sellers of every sort of eatable and drinkable thing wander
up and down.

Paris is credited with living most of its life under all men's eyes, and
London certainly may share this reputation as far as eating goes. In
fact, working London, taking the poorest class both in pay and rank, has