MINSTER 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 _flaneur_ 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 co