ght and
hearing. But for the vague shifting and alteration of the light, London
might be a painted city. The little figure of man is so quenched,
incredibly. His town keeps the black crowds and their voices out of reach,
and it is difficult to believe in the noise, so deaf is the distance.

London is at the mercy of her roads, and it is no wonder the fancy should
give them life. And now it is for their coming, not their going, that they
seem in haste. The town has covered up the original and all-fruitful
earth; her pavements seal up all the springs of earthly life, and her
roads are loaded with the fruits of earth unsealed. It is upon her, then,
that the roads are turned with boat, train, and cart charged with her
bread. What flocks and herds are daily hunted into the unproductive town,
the town wherefrom nothing, nothing--for all its factories--takes birth;
the town that visibly burns up, with never-ceasing reek of the
never-ceasing burning, the substance of the world. The flame of life is
fed fully in a thousand forms, and the flame of fire, smouldering in the
furnaces at the foot of these chimneys, is the sign of the enormous
sacrifice.

[Illustration: VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER.]

THE SMOULDERING CITY

Because the town covers her fires, sits darkling in her daily and nightly
burning, and sequesters flame from flame in a thousand thousand little
chambers of their own, there is but small show of the perpetual devouring
whereby fire abides among men as a long companion. Ariel of a hotter name
and of a wilder element, willing and brief, delicate and eager, quick to
finish and be gone, a hasty servant, is fire the mere visitant, unused to
these long hours. But fire in London never escapes. It is bound in
perpetual business, and if it flashes away for a moment it is recaptured
in another flash, and if it slips away under cover of ashes it is
overtaken and bound to the task again. Man, then, willingly pays the wages
of such a wildness in servitude, and spends mines and forests to keep the
mobile creature close within his gates.

[Illustration: _Rain, Smoke and Traffic._]

If there is little show of that multitudinous presence, there is a
broadcast sign of it. 'No smoke without a fire'; and the sky of London
continually betrays her house-mate. It is the flag signalling the presence
of the unseen creature; not by colour and brilliance like its own, but by
a folding and unfolding of banners of darknes