I was killing an hour in Soho when I ran into Cross, hot-foot from the East. We met in a dingy passage leading out of Newton Court, where remnants of second-hand furniture, illprotected from the rain by awnings, were set half across the pavement to tempt poor souls who meditated marriage and housekeeping on twenty or thirty shillings a week. The squalid front of Newton Court, a mountain of ugly tenements intersected by iron staircases and girded at every story by iron banister rails, shadowed the passage uncompromisingly and spelt gloom. The air and dinginess were oppressive, and one felt a great pity for the denizens of the place. A loiterer was eyeing a dilapidated bath, black and rusty with its cracked paint, a bait for some rich eccentric. Our eyes met in a chipped mirror with grotesque distortions, and he turned uneasily to examine other things which he seemed anxious to carry over the way,shabby, worm-eaten chests of drawers, shredded horse-hair chairs, and an ottoman which looked as if it had once been garish, and was now covered with pathetic remnants of books marked 2d. each, and so detached from all human interest that one felt they could only be bought for ostentation. The rain trickled through the awning, and I was just thinking of the East, particularly a corner of it which seemed to me the most perfect antithesis to all this, when I ran into Cross, the very man with whom I had shared this little antithetical paradise not so many months before.

It was the old furniture, the symbol of all our fictitious standards and needs, that set me thinking of India. From pitying people who have made

such lumbers as necessary to themselves as a roof over their heads, one's thoughts would naturally turn to happier folk who often need no roof at all, to a land of strong sunshine and clean air. For the drabness of London, far more than one realizes, may be charged to its sunlessness,-the drabness alike of its facts and its ideals. Everywhere that the sun shines, and one may count on its shining through the greater part of the year, there will be found a larger measure of peace, fewer needs, a simpler standard of living. And this is so true that it might almost be said that the aggregate peace of mind of any people could be gauged by the number of months or weeks in the year it is possible for them to lie down and go to sleep in

the open air. and Ganjam.

Apply the test to London There the man who has failed, to take the case of the abject poor, can lie down anywhere in the sun or shade and rest; no policeman will disturb him, and he can build himself a shelter if he needs it. The poor are fed without contempt, so long as there is no famine and there is enough to go round. In London poverty is made hideous by the fear of having nowhere to sleep, of being left out in the street, on the pavement, in the gutter, in the cold and the wet; by the horror of not being respectable, of not having (more than not being) this or that. Here and there, too, men are trying to push one another off the plank. But here the game is crueller, as the plank spans an abyss. The death of a starved ryot in a famine district must be euthanasia compared with being submerged in London. The man who sees this will be a sunworshipper. Gloom and cold and fog

and fighting on a plank have strengthened us, but they have made us sad, vulgar and shabby-genteel.

The unsophisticated Hindu entering London would be bewildered by the number of its totems and fetishes, and the elaborate decencies for which so many people live unnatural and indecent lives, stifling honest instincts or diverting them into unwholesome channels for the sake of stiff collars and a meaningless uniformity of apparel. He would find nothing in London as God made it; the second-hand furniture shop, the plush and varnish of Suburbia, would fill him with uneasiness. I can imagine him routed by Newton Court, distressed in a stupid uninquiring way, as a bird that has lit on a grimy collier in its passage South. Pedda Logidi, to give his home a name, would gleam at the end of a vista intolerably remote. A clean, sunlit courtyard and a whitewashed room; green leaves for table service; for clothes, a shift to wind round him; for his penates, nothing but a mat or two, a charpoy, and a few burnished vessels, scrupulously clean; for ornament, whatever mystic designs he might choose to trace in chalk on the lintel or threshold, and a garland of mangoeleaves hung over the door for luck. A place to sleep soundly in and wake every morning to the music of rustling palm-leaves bowing rhythmically in harmony with the faint hum of birds and insects and the tinkling bells of the cattle going out to pasture.

I was seeing this eye to eye with him, when there came a swinging step behind, then a violent blow on my shoulder, and I turned to find my friend standing there to attention with a certain glow in his eyes, but speechless with the impulse of the race to let an encounter explain itself with as little help as possible.

"Isn't this fine?" were his first words.

"Isn't what fine?"

"Why, this," he said, swinging his stick round to indicate the derelict furniture, the chipped mirror, the dismal fruit-stall, the web of suspended telephone wire, and the uncompromising front of Newton Count.

"I was thinking of Pedda Logidi," I said.

"Oh yes, Pedda Logidi! But come along; I want to soak in this."

He linked his arm in mine and swung into Gerrard Street, treading air. I let him rave, for I knew how it all struck him. He still saw London as we saw it in the wilderness, as most exiles do in distant parts of the earth, thinking of it as the home of romance, the epitome of the human race, a city prolific in adventure. All this which seemed to me so grimy and squalid and repulsive was to him a facet merely of a dearly-recovered possession; it stood for his dreams of the place in far lands, and he was turning the crystal dotingly. Now it was Soho. To-night it would be the West End. In the meantime everything was good, even the poisonous prints and drinks and smokes displayed in the shop-windows. He lingered enchanted in a muggy current of air that oozed from a French restaurant, carrying the savor of onions and pot au feu across the pavement. He found joy in the modest assurance of a group of French laundresses seen through a basement window ironing linen, the sleeves of their gray print dresses turned up at the elbow. "Purdah Nashin" was on his lips contemptuously as we pulled up in Soho Square.

Here weeping plane-trees were scattering their sparse leaves. Their trunks, blotched and scored like dominoes where the gritty bark had fallen, took on a spectral white from the reflections of the electric light, which quivered on the railings, the dripping pavement, and the gray behind every

thing. A fog was creeping up, so that the gaunt houses which flanked the garden on all sides were made barely discernable by dim lights penetrating curtains and drawn blinds. Not a hundred yards off rose and fell the insistent roar of Oxford Street, while the only immediate sign of life at our feet was a cat dejectedly seeking a dry place.

And this was the London we had personified in the stillness of forests,a city impersonal, but remembering, appreciative even sometimes, as when one dreams of the echo of one's feet on her pavements as the sound of a caress. Did Cross, I wondered, now that he had come back, his work done, expect to find a ripple on her face, and in the deeps somewhere a pebble to mark an endeavor. I had laughed at him once for falling into dreams over a scrap of tin or some civilized relic, valued because it must have passed by the banks of the Thames, just as a lover is moved to reverie over a relic of his mistress. But there was the picture, cranes and barges and hurrying feet over Hungerford Bridge.

It was always one of our amusements to visualize London. I remember how, in the wilds, a book had twice the charm if the scene were laid there; how, when we read that Major Pendennis walked down Jermyn Street, we remembered the times we had walked down Jermyn Street ourselves, and the times we would walk down Jermyn Street again, if the good God were compassionate. I remember Cross sitting up half the night over a trashy novel because the scene was laid in Holland Park, and eagerly turning the pages in the hope that a policeman would turn down some lane that he knew, or a hansom pull up in a familiar street. And in Europe he could not have read beyond the first chapter.

And here he was, come back into it all with the old freshness. He had left

a land of sunshine, greenery, and visible content, a semi-outdoor life, horses which the West denied him,-for in London he could not afford a hack,and an endless belt of wood, and hill and marsh-land which might have been his own preserve, and was seldom disturbed save by the crack of his own gun. And what, you may well ask, had London to offer in exchange for all this? Whatever it might be, he was well content. His ideal had not yet failed him. Standing there in Soho Square, I could piece it together more or less from tags of camp talk heard and remembered in the Maliahs. For the zest of the man made his words oddly memorable. He was one of those spontaneous souls whose thoughts run naturally into words, who seem to have no thought of-certainly no affectation of-reserve, and happily no need of it.

First in his perspective, I think, gleamed that curve of lights by the embankment from Charing Cross to Waterloo Bridge, and the gardens behind, which is Adelphi Terrace, with the windows looking out over the Thames, where hobnob the votaries of the Muses; and this, he thought, was the finest view in the world. Near by, in eddies off the Strand and Fleet Street, are the dens of men who write, old friends who still dream in familiar rooms, where walls and shelves dimly indicate their visions. And beyond, only a mile or two to north and west, in squares and streets and crescents, are the dozen or more houses where one is made welcome. Here are women like none else in the world, beautiful every one of them in some respect or other, buoyant and easy of galt, tall, fair, with clear, quiet eyes and voices rich as the tones of a bell. He could not speak of London without rhapsody!

What a home-coming his must have been! Suez passed, one can imagine the

first contact with Europe in the white crowds of Marseilles and Paris. These are good, but unsatisfying, landmarks on the path. Then the chalk cliffs of Dover, where is real earth, nurse of the whitest men on earth-soil, one feels, of which a grain must have more virtue than tons of Asiatic rubble. Here John of Gaunt's words, freshly remembered, warm the blood like wine, as one steps ashore and leaves the waters

as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands.

Charing Cross receives one, grim, friendly, and demoniac, with its shrill insistent traffic. Then out into the -streets, to drift aimlessly, ecstatically in the crowd.

II.

I left London for a month, and came back to find Cross disconsolate. Take

a man from Gilgit or Kentung, plant him in the Strand, and he will feel just as young as the day he went away. And every time he revisits London the -old illusions will come back and stay with him for at least ten days, just as if everything had stood still in the interval of his absence, ready for him to come home and pick up the thread. But the new zest is short-lived. It may be we have not the buoyancy we had, though we keep youtḥ longer than stay-at-home folk, whom we find disproportionately aged and disciplined. <Cross was disappointed. Old friends, of course, had not changed, but others with whom he used to be fairly intimate quite failed in their well-meant efforts to appear cordial. A. was smothered in the defensive wrappings of etiquette; B. submerged in a commonplace marriage; C. absorbed in the routine of business. Their coldness Iwas quite unconscious; and Cross laid the blame, perhaps unjustly, on an of

fice or an unimaginative wife, while, as a matter of fact, A., B., and C. had probably obeyed the laws of civilization, which overlook wild men of the woods, and leave them with the instincts of a schoolboy or a savage.

Speaking ingenuously as one of these, with whom ten years more or less of the open air must have made him kin,-a kinship which ten days of London confirmed,-my friend was wondering if A., B., and C. ever realize how depressing they and their city are to men from the frontiers. It was nearly ten years since Cross had last set foot in London, and he had returned to find things very much changed. Perhaps the change was in himself. A life under broad skies may have reduced him to paganism. Anyhow, he was disappointed in London. I do not record this because I think London will be concerned at his criticisms, but because there must be many Londoners who would like to know how they appear to simpler folk. I have always found that evolved people are much more interested in savages than savages are in evolution. Cross must be wrong, of course. I am not too dull to recognize this, and to see that in other respects, as, for instance, when I agree with Cross, my vision must be defective. Things must appear to him inverted, like the distortions one has seen on the back of a spoon. His discontent must be due to devolution, and his impressions primitive enough to make them psychologically interesting. They may not be new; they are certainly more intuitive than derived. But they are spontaneous, the views of a man of action who has done good work quietly; a man who has his own definite plot to attend to, and knows exactly what he has done or failed to do for England, -a frontiers-man, in fact.

Men of his type often find London vaguely distressing after the spacious

ness of the East: it appears to them like a monster that is fed on human lives. They see the whole machine pulsing and throbbing and making earth hideous with its discordant din, and they know nothing of the springs and motives that keep the mechanism going. Destiny has been tender enough to leave them out of the mill. Yet they are the men who do the work. "Nothing is done in London," say the men from the Marches. "Whitehall, Pall Mall, Westminster? They occasionally put in an unintelligent spoke and thwart us with the best intentions."

Cross had already swept them away in a flood of invective, when he turned again on the men in the street. We were watching the crowd from the security of a first-floor window, and wondering how any man could pass his days in it without becoming dehumanized. Every one looked so unhappy and anxious, as if they were living under a continual strain, which was very probably the case. A few loitered vacuously by the shop-windows, like seaweed drifting in a current; while others struggled east and west, pushing one another off the pavement in a jarring conflict of aims, each man trying to get more out of life than another, to deceive, under-sell, or outwit him. And one knew that all this which one saw on the surface was being repeated underground in a warren of tunnels and tubes, and overhead in a network of wires,-the work of men restlessly striving to communiIcate with one another in their efforts to find some peculiar need of the organism which they can furnish for a price.

Across the pavement a bun-shop was disgorging its anæmic crowd. "You wouldn't believe," Cross was saying, "that only a century ago the stock these men are sprung from fought like Paladins for a sentiment. Look at

them now! Poor devils, what chance have they, bred in an atmosphere like this, with a policeman round the corner? Naturally they look on sudden death as phenomenal. Yet nine out of ten of the men you see in the street believe that, being products of progress, their servitude is more dignified than that of their forbears in the days of feudalism. "Dark ages," they call them; and these days, when usurers and sweaters have ousted the military over-lord, they term "enlightened." How many men do you think in that crowd can call their soul their own? They are all bought and sold, driven and hurried, dependent on caprice. London has become the biggest slavemarket in the world; there is an epic of misery in the wake of every selfmade capitalist.

"But why gird at London?" I said. "The weakest must go under. It is a natural law that holds everywhere."

"Yes, but it is the quality that makes for fitness that I quarrel with. The standards of strength and weakness change, and the modern standard is the presence or absence of the shopkeeper's instinct of gain, with or without honor. The battle goes to the man with the greatest vitality and the least scruples, to men who never miss a weak spot or hesitate to strike at it. Every generous instinct must be a flaw in their armor; every human interest must weigh them down. Look at that man there with the loose green overcoat. You can see he has pawned the coat underneath it, and very likely his shirt. He is drifting in the crowd in the hope that something may turn up; but he feels that his foothold is slipping, and the threads have slipped from his fingers. I can imagine him crushed by the nightmare of London's indifference until he would rather fall into the hands of cannibals than go under in that crowd.

"Even those who emerge and gain