that upper reach. Putney, too, looks Anglican on a
dwindling scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments slop
over, one misses Bladesover and there come first squalid stretches of
mean homes right and left and then the dingy industrialism of the
south side, and on the north bank the polite long front of nice houses,
artistic, literary, administrative people's residences, that stretches
from Cheyne Walk nearly to Westminster and hides a wilderness of slums.
What a long slow crescendo that is, mile after mile, with the houses
crowding closelier, the multiplying succession of church towers, the
architectural moments, the successive bridges, until you come out into
the second movement of the piece with Lambeth's old palace under your
quarter and the houses of Parliament on your bow! Westminster Bridge
is ahead of you then, and through it you flash, and in a moment the
round-faced clock tower cranes up to peer at you again and New
Scotland Yard squares at you, a fat beef-eater of a policeman disguised
miraculously as a Bastille.

For a stretch you have the essential London; you have Charing Cross
railway station, heart of the world, and the Embankment on the north
side with its new hotels overshadowing its Georgian and Victorian
architecture, and mud and great warehouses and factories, chimneys, shot
towers, advertisements on the south. The northward skyline grows more
intricate and pleasing, and more and more does one thank God for Wren.
Somerset House is as picturesque as the civil war, one is reminded again
of the original England, one feels in the fretted sky the quality of
Restoration Lace.

And then comes Astor's strong box and the lawyers' Inns.

(I had a passing memory of myself there, how once I had trudged along
the Embankment westward, weighing my uncle's offer of three hundred
pounds a year....)

Through that central essential London reach I drove, and X2 bored
her nose under the foam regardless of it all like a black hound going
through reeds--on what trail even I who made her cannot tell.

And in this reach, too, one first meets the seagulls and is reminded of
the sea. Blackfriars one takes--just under these two bridges and just
between them is the finest bridge moment in the world--and behold,
soaring up, hanging in the sky over a rude tumult of warehouses, over a
jostling competition of traders, irrelevantly beautiful and altogether
remote, Saint Paul's! "Of course!" one says, "Saint Paul's!" I