surprises of the journey.

Another surprise is that you fall in love with the City steeples, and find it dull to pass out of their influence of serenity and fancy to come amongst the Gothic towers and spires of the suburbs. These last are studious and consistent, properly retrospective, and full of principle and history. Moreover, they are well seen, for they stand in the wide dwarf town, with nothing of their own measure except the Board Schools. All the shabbier suburbs are dwarfs, and none drop so suddenly and go so near the ground as the suburbs of the north-east. But there are too many Gothic towers; whereas of the lovely spires of Wren and of his followers we shall have no more. No one, it seems, plots to recapture that signal inspiration, so delicate, so inventive, so full of dignity and freaks. Nothing is quite so beautiful as the spire of Bow, but it must be permitted to admire a slender steeple in Shoreditch, and one close to the Blue-Coat School, the much less ingenious one by the Post Office, even the prankish one near the Mansion House, besides the beautiful St. Mary’s in the Strand, and the only less charming St. Clement Danes. And all these lily-like spires have kept, more or less, their paleness in the smirched and spotted town. They are fine against all the London skies, and never more beautiful than with a bright grey sky, and the half-sunshine of a characteristic London day on their happy little cupolas and small and exquisite columns, except, perhaps, when a westering sun makes their white a golden rose. St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, has but a squat spire, set with flourishing little urns; but it has many trees tossing in the summer wind, and in its garden a fountain where the pigeons and sparrows bathe together. Across the geraniums and lobelias of another quadrangle, full of sun and translucent shadow, you may see the gold of the altar-lights, and white surplices gilded with that gold. The tradition—a Dickens tradition, it seems—of the desolate City church is still true as to the numbers of the congregations: in this open church there are but three people, exceedingly devout; but the old woman, the beadle, the gloom are gone.

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WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

There is one respect in which Sunday flatters the town. It fills with iron blinds and shutters the hollows of the shops whereby London usually looks as though the houses found a kind of helpless security in their long, staggering, lateral union, a prop for houses that have lost their feet. Again, it helps the summer to put out many fires, and helps the live wind to sift the darkness from the sunlight.

A PILGRIM

Now and then a firefly strays from the vineyard into the streets of an Italian city, and goes quenched in the light of the shops. The stray and waif from ‘the very country’ that comes to London is a silver-white seed with silken spokes or sails. There is no depth of the deep town that this visitant does not penetrate in August—going in, going far, going through, by virtue of its indescribable gentleness. The firefly has only a wall to cross, but the shining seed comes a long way, a careless alien but a mighty traveller. Indestructibly fragile, the most delicate of all the visible signs of the breeze, it goes to town, makes light of the capital, sets at nought the thoroughfares and the omnibuses, especially flouts the Park, one may suppose, where it does not grow. It hovers and leaps at about the height of first-floor windows, by many a mile of dull drawing-rooms, a country creature quite unconverted to London and undismayed. This flâneur makes as little of our London as his ancestor made of Chaucer’s.

Sometimes it takes a flight on a stronger wind, and its whiteness shows dark with slight shadow against bright clouds, as the whiter snow-flake also looks dark from its shadow side. Then it comes down in a tumult of flight upon the city. It is a very strong little seed-pod, set with arms, legs, or sails—so ingeniously set that though all grow from the top of the pod their points together make a globe; on these it turns a ‘cart-wheel’ like a human boy—like many boys, in fact, it must overtake on its way through the less respectable of the suburbs—only better. Every limb, itself so fine, is feathered with little plumes that are as thin as autumn spider-webs. Nothing steps so delicately as that seed, or upon such extreme tiptoe. But it does not walk far; the air bears the charges of the wild journey.

Thistle-seeds—if thistle-seeds they be—make few and brief halts, then roll their wheel on the stones for a while, and then the wheel is a-wing again. You encounter them in the country, setting out for town on a south wind, and in London there is not a street they do not recklessly stray along. For they use our arbitrary streets; it does not seem that they make a bee-line over the top of the houses, and cross London thus. They use the streets which they treat so lightly. They conform, for the time, to human courses, and stroll down Bond Street and turn up Piccadilly, and go to the Bank on a long west wind—their strolling being done at a certain height, in moderate mid-air.

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TERRIBLE LONDON.

They generally travel wildly alone, but now and then you shall see two of them, as you see butterflies go in couples, flitting at leisure at Charing Cross. The extreme ends of their tender plumes have touched and have lightly caught each other. But singly they go by all day, with long rises and long descents as the breeze may sigh, or more quickly on a high level way of theirs. Nothing wilder comes to town—not even the scent of hay on morning winds at market-time in June; for the hay is for cab-horses, and it is at home in the clattering mews, and has a London habit of its own.

White meteor, lost star, bright as a cloud, the seed has many images of its radiant flight. But there is only one thing really like it—the point of light caught by a diamond, with the regular surrounding rays.

THE EFFECT OF LONDON

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The Nerves of London.

It is no wonder if the painters of London are somewhat eager for the help of smoke. A simple glance at the streets—and the glance that would appreciate so mingled a sight as that of London must be simple—shows you that the detail of our streets is the closest detail in the world. Nowhere else do the houses, the carriages, and the people, all alike, wear the minute spots of hard colour that make a London street by bright daylight look so sharp and small. In cities abroad, for instance, you find some blank spaces of wall on the fronts of the houses, narrow spaces in the north, but wider and wider as you go south. In other cities is here and there a closing of the eyelids with a smoothing of the faces of the streets; here alone the unshuttered windows are set close together; the street glances and chatters with the false vivacity of these perpetual windows. Shops and windows run into rows