ofs abound in the poorer town, where red walls are absent; they
are built up with grey and black, needless to say, in such a manner that
their old gables are hidden in square frontages and straight cornices, and
their colours made invisible except to a view from above. It is from a
high railway that you may see the darkened but still soft and charming
colour spreading from roof to roof of the cottage-streets of older London,
until it looks--fading eastwards--as though it were itself some effect of
a London sunset. That flush almost reaches the regions of the red-hot
eastern furnaces hidden coldly under black and grey.

The waters of the Thames could hardly quench so great a multitude of
imprisoned flames. Fire is the secret of the Thames itself, lurking as it
does in the ships and boats; the black barges are charged to feed it, and
the airs that wander with the river fan it to its perpetual work. It is
trained within its little shrines, and leaps in chains and captivity, and
runs in narrow courses. With its cold ashes and its cold grime, with the
burden of its chill refuse, all the remote roads and byways of the town
seem to be utterly choked and filled.

When the Great Fire of London came out of its hiding-places and took life
in the air of day, it made ashes of more evident and conspicuous things,
but it can hardly have made more ashes and cinders than it makes daily
under cover. London is not destroyed again, but it has become the place of
immeasurable destruction. Moreover, since the smouldering city is a city
of men, the life of men, so multiplied, makes London a very centre of
fires insatiable. That life burns within five millions of furnaces. Life
feeds itself by fire, but out of London we are accustomed to see it at its
consuming work side by side with the signs of unceasing re-creation. Man,
woman, and child, sprinkled over the labouring land, are separate flames
far apart like the marsh flames of wildfire. Between them graze the sheep,
the wheat turns brown, or the apple reddens, and the husbandman's life
itself is immediately paid again in labour to the soil. Whereas London
visibly works at nothing but transformation.

The delicate fire, that plays and vanishes elsewhere, but cannot vanish in
London, has nowhere else so gross and dead a following. Even in the north,
where the factory makes a denser cloud, you find the blue close by, and
the horizon cleaner, or so it seems. Little distant things on the verge,