s. The quicker and hotter the
enclosed fire, the duller is the sign. It is a sign that denies and
confesses at once. Not a curl of flame, not a glow of furnace is visible
under the hurrying blackness of river-side smoke that hangs house and wall
with the grey tokens of invisible and splendid flame. Fire is the blush,
and when London shows colour it is the cool red, not the hot.

Such colour has been all alight on many midsummer evenings. Hardly a town
away from these dark latitudes could show a fresher or fuller flash of
dyes. A coloured sky, a coloured sun, coloured cloud, the red of brick
softly empurpled, or made rosy, or turned a frolic scarlet, and the green
of trees, yet undarkened by the later days of summer--all this stirs and
lightens under the soft hurry of a west wind, so that a drive between
seven and eight o'clock is a surprise of red and blue. White is
wanting--the white surface that would look beautiful in western sunshine.
All the white is bad and unfortunate, whether it is the paint of Regent
Street or the stucco of suburbs; and where there is no beauty of white
there must be much lacking. It is grotesque to find the silly oil-paint
gloss of the Quadrant glazing back the tender sun, where one looked for
white made luminous. Seldom does the country landscape fail--especially
where it is gently populous--to hold up some tempered white to the rosy
sun; where there is no chalk or white quarry, or cliff, or white
hawthorn-tree or white cherry, there is the welcome whitewash of a cottage
wall. London, undecked with its white, and wearing little or no yellow,
has nevertheless a choice of these kindling reds of her various bricks;
and so decked with the colours of fire she is at her freshest. It is as
when you touch the red of a deep cheek and find it cool.

The general fire has no part in the coloured evening; that sunny wind
blows the sign of flame away. In the thicket of fire there is no red brick
or green tree, or rosy cloud, or any light blue sky. Those who find
something to complain of in the rebuilding of the west of London in brick,
because the architecture is not everywhere what it should be, are hardly
thankful enough for the colour. The builder may build amiss, but he builds
with a colour that becomes all our skies, whether grey or bright. One day
he will, perhaps, begin a fashion of using much more white, in brick and
tile, and the fiery town will look relieved from her suggestion of fever.
Ruddy ro