each window a little silent prayer. Nearer and nearer to
town you race, and the warm windows multiply, they draw closer
together, seeming to creep into one another's arms for snugness; and, as
you roll into the misty sparkle of Euston or Paddington, you experience
an ineffable sense of comfort and security among those multitudinous
homes. It is, I think, the essential homeliness of London that draws the
Cockney's heart to her when five thousand miles away, under blazing suns
or hurricanes of hail; for your Cockney, travel and wander as he will,
is at heart a purely domestic animal, and dreams ever of the lighted
windows of London.

Those windows! I wish some one with the right mind would write an essay
for me on this theme. Why should a lighted window call with so subtle a
message? They all have their messages--sometimes sweet, sometimes
sinister, sometimes terrible, sometimes pathetic, always irresistible.
They haunt me. Indeed, when a lighted window claims me, I have sometimes
hung about outside, impelled almost to knock at the door, and find out
what is happening behind that yellow oblong of mystery.

Some one published a few years ago a book entitled "The Soul of London,"
but I cannot think that any one has ever read the soul of London. London
is not one place, but many places; she has not one soul, but many souls.
The people of Brondesbury are of markedly different character and clime
from those of Hammersmith. They of Balham know naught of those of
Walthamstow, and Bayswater is oblivious to Barking. The smell, the
sound, and the dress of Finsbury Park are as different from the smell,
the sound, and the dress of Wandsworth Common as though one were England
and the other Nicaragua. London is all things to all men. Day by day she
changes, not only in external beauty, but in temperament.

As each season recurs, so one feels that London can never be more
beautiful, never better express her inmost spirit. I write these lines
in September, when we have mornings of pearly mist, all the city a
Whistler pastel, the air bland but stung with sharp points, and the
squares dressed in many-tinted garments; and I feel that this is the
month of months for the Londoner. Yet in April, when every parish, from
Bloomsbury to Ilford, and from Haggerston to Cricklewood, is a dream of
lilac and may, and when laburnum and jasmine are showering their petals
over Shoreditch and Bermondsey Wall, when even Cherry Gardens Pier has
lost its he