nean or a
hidden Thames, at the level to which the sway and swing of the path will
settle. And throughout London the direction of streets seems to be a
rather secret thing, and misleading--the sign of a town that has not been
ordered as a machine is ordered, but has felt its way like an organism.
Slight tendencies, convergences, divergences, lead the streets wandering
and draw lines long astray. Old and forgotten causes have brought to pass
the slight misgoing that first takes the streets apart--old rights or the
accidents of private liberty; and what these began the chances of sequence
have ended, a mile astray. Doubtless, besides, the swing of the river has
tended to set streets a-flowing too.

But the downward fluctuation of little City streets towards the water is a
briefer thing, and as full of drawing as the upper line of a flexible fan
foreshortened. The long straying streets are too vague for drawing. In
these City lanes, too, there is some rest for the eyes from the infinite
detail of the street, and even from the tyranny of windows. Only in their
warehouses are to be found spaces of plain wall, but unluckily the plain
wall is also black.

[Illustration: END OF A WINTER DAY.]

[Illustration: _The Embankment at Night._]

THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE

It is some little treason to a natural storm to admire too eagerly the
mimic wrack and menace of the paltry tempest of the smoke. Only by
acknowledging the climate of London to be more than half an artificial
climate, and by treating our own handiwork--the sky of our
manufacture--with a relative contempt, are we excused for thinking the
effects in any sense beautiful. Let us avoid serious words of description.
The whirls of floating smoke that darken the sunset are 'lurid' to no very
grand purpose; and the threat from even twice as many kitchen fires never
would be terrible. It is a tale signifying nothing. Let us grant that
there is now and then an effect of handsome grime, but there is no system
in this scenery of smoke. What form seems at times to declare itself is
bestowed by the light. The sun rules from a centre, whatever the
circumference be made of--mist from mountain heights or vapour from that
series of successive fleeting solitudes, the ocean, or refuse from a
million fireplaces; and from this reigning centre his rays seem to compel
a kind of organism. There is no chance-medley where he rules, because of
his long, distributed lights, and stra