nch a happy place, I corrected the
excess of brightness and gave its walls a pine-torch glow; I set them in
the middle of a great square, and hung the standard of England drooping
over them in a sort of mournful family pride. Then, because I next
conceived it a foreign kind of place, different altogether from that
home growth of ours, the Tower of London, I topped it with a multitude
of domes of pumpkin or turban shape, resembling the Kremlin of Moscow,
which had once leapt up in the eye of Winter, glowing like a million
pine-torches, and flung shadows of stretching red horses on the black
smoke-drift. But what was the Kremlin, that had seen a city perish, to
this Bench where my father languished! There was no comparing them for
tragic horror. And the Kremlin had snow-fields around it; this Bench
was caught out of sight, hemmed in by an atmosphere thick as Charon
breathed; it might as well be underground.

'Oh! it's London,' Temple went on, correcting his incorrigible doubts
about it. He jumped on the platform; we had to call out not to lose one
another. 'I say, Richie, this is London,' he said, linking his arm in
mine: 'you know by the size of the station; and besides, there's the
fog. Oh! it's London. We've overshot it, we're positively in London.'

I could spare no sympathy for his feelings, and I did not respond to his
inquiring looks. Now that we were here I certainly wished myself away,
though I would not have retreated, and for awhile I was glad of the
discomforts besetting me; my step was hearty as I led on, meditating
upon asking some one the direction to the Bench presently. We had
to walk, and it was nothing but traversing on a slippery pavement
atmospheric circles of black brown and brown red, and sometimes a larger
circle of pale yellow; the colours of old bruised fruits, medlars,
melons, and the smell of them; nothing is more desolate. Neither of us
knew where we were, nor where we were going. We struggled through an
interminable succession of squalid streets, from the one lamp visible to
its neighbour in the darkness: you might have fancied yourself peering
at the head of an old saint on a smoky canvas; it was like the painting
of light rather than light. Figures rushed by; we saw no faces.

Temple spoke solemnly: 'Our dinner-hour at home is half-past six.' A
street-boy overheard him and chaffed him. Temple got the worst of it,
and it did him good, for he had the sweetest nature in the world. We
decline