nament that on the whole of the
northern facade there was only one of his favourite cherub's heads!
What a parish!

It was a parish of flat brick walls and brass door-knobs and brass
plates. And the first commandment was to polish every brass door-knob
and every brass plate every morning. What happened in the way of
disfigurement by polishing paste to the surrounding brick or wood had
no importance. The conventions of the parish had no eye save for brass
door-knobs and brass plates, which were maintained daily in effulgence
by a vast early-rising population. Recruiting offices, casualty lists,
the rumour of peril and of glory, could do nothing to diminish the
high urgency of the polishing of those brass door-knobs and those
brass plates.

The shops and offices seemed to show that the wants of customers were
few and simple. Grouse moors, fisheries, yachts, valuations, hosiery,
neckties, motor-cars, insurance, assurance, antique china, antique
pictures, boots, riding-whips, and, above all, Eastern cigarettes!
The master-passion was evidently Eastern cigarettes. The few provision
shops were marmoreal and majestic, catering as they did chiefly for
the multifarious palatial male clubs which dominated the parish and
protected and justified the innumerable "bachelor" suites that hung
forth signs in every street. The parish, in effect, was first an
immense monastery, where the monks, determined to do themselves
extremely well in dignified peace, had made a prodigious and not
entirely unsuccessful effort to keep out the excitable sex. And,
second, it was an excusable conspiracy on the part of intensely
respectable tradesmen and stewards to force the non-bargaining sex to
pay the highest possible price for the privilege of doing the correct
thing.

G.J. passed through the cardiac region of St. James's, the Square
itself, where knights, baronets, barons, brewers, viscounts,
marquesses, hereditary marshals and chief butlers, dukes, bishops,
banks, librarians and Government departments gaze throughout the four
seasons at the statue of a Dutchman; and then he found himself at his
bootmaker's.

Now, his bootmaker was one of the three first bootmakers in the West
End, bearing a name famous from Peru to Hong Kong. An untidy interior,
full of old boots and the hides of various animals! A dirty girl was
writing in a dirty tome, and a young man was knotting together two
pieces of string in order to tie up a parcel. Such was the "note