ls, and children, is curious, especially in the
further east. They go in great straggling gangs, and though they do
nothing--not even much talking--they give a false air of lawlessness to
the streaming street. They are the ugliest of all the populace, their
clothing, besides, being the most dull and indescribable, and their
bearing indefinitely defiant. The men of other kinds and ages, and the
women, who needs must balance such a horde of men of twenty, seem to
spend less of their Sunday on the road, and you may see them, accordingly,
in great numbers in the open spaces--the vague lands on the other side of
Clapton, for instance. Very few people of any kind seem to be within their
houses in the free afternoon.

In spite of the length of London, you may pass from the furthest west to
the extreme east, and from the last country field to the first, so quickly
as to get a continuous Sunday impression--the day and the people flowing,
unfolding, and closing, from suburb to remote suburb, through 'town,'
through the City, through the east, and to the verge of breathless and
unfragrant meadows, divided by a league-long tramway line lost in the
distances of Epping, whither the smoke, from which a south-west wind has
set all London radiantly free, is trailing a broken wing.

Even in the centre of the City it cannot be said that the main streets are
deserted; for they evidently are all thoroughfares towards the unknown
places to which these thousands and thousands of crossing feet are bent.
But the secondary streets are swept and vacant; and the effect of the
absence of people is to turn the whole picture pale. The asphaltic streets
are almost white, and in this light-grey London, colourless but clear, you
realise how much man darkens and blackens the earth in these latitudes by
his mere presence. The natural surface of the world, it seems, is rather
blond than dark; the quarry is white, and the harvest bright; with which
agrees the delicate, high, and sensitive soft colour of the body. It is a
pity that mere black, brown, and grey dyes should so change the colour of
the race--squalid dyes, in which are steeped the unchanged and the
unwashed garments of these quite innumerable young men. It may be noted
that the great majority of the London Sunday women are fresh to see. We
all know that there are alleys and corners where the women look otherwise,
but those who take their part in this Sunday, so famous in allusions, who
join in th