it turns past the National Gallery into St.
Martin's place. Through Duncannon Street, we enter the Strand, now
almost deserted save for a few stray figures and a hurrying taxicab. We
then turn into Villiers Street, and in a few minutes we are on York
Terrace, overlooking the Thames embankment. The elm trees and the
beeches stand about like green ghosts in the pale night. At the edge of
the water Cleopatra's Needle is a black silhouette. We should like to
walk through the Gardens in the starlight, but the formidable iron gates
are locked against us. So we turn up Robert Street into Adelphi Terrace.
We lean for a moment against the railing.

There below us, a crinkling tapestry of gilts, silvers and coppery
pinks, is ancient Father Thames, the emperor and archbishop of all
earthly streams. There are the harsh waters (but now so soft!) that the
Romans braved, watching furtively for blue savages along the banks, and
the Danes after the Romans, and the Normans after the Danes, and
innumerable companies of hardy seafarers in the long years following. At
this lovely turning, where the river flouts the geography books by
flowing almost due northward for a mile, bloody battles must have been
fought in those old, forgotten, far-off times--and battles, I venture,
not always ending with Roman cheers. One pictures some young naval
lieutenant, just out of the Tiber Annapolis, and brash and nosey like
his kind--one sees some such youngster pushing thus far in his light
craft, and perhaps going around on the mud of the south bank, and there
fighting to the death with Britons of the fog-wrapped marshes, "hairy,
horrible, human." And one sees, too, his return to the fleet so snug at
Gravesend, an imperfect carcass lashed to a log, the pioneer and prophet
of all that multitude of dead men who have since bobbed down this dirty
tide. Dead men, and men alive--men full of divine courage and high
hopes, the great dreamers and experimenters of the race. Out of this
sluggish sewer the Anglo-Saxon, that fabulous creature, has gone forth
to his blundering conquest of the earth. And conquering, he has brought
back his loot to the place of his beginning. The great liners flashing
along their policed and humdrum lanes, have long since abandoned London,
but every turn of the tide brings up her fleet of cargo ships,
straggling, weather-worn and grey, trudging in from ports far-flung and
incredible--Surinam, Punta Arenas, Antofagasta, Port Banana, Tang-