distant as El Dorado, and as desirable.' The sentence limned with
precision the impression which London used to produce upon Drake. The
sight of it touched upon some single chord of fancy in a nature otherwise
prosaic, of which the existence was unsuspected by his few companions and
unrealised by himself.

Working in that tower which you could see from the summit of the Elm-tree
Hill topping the sky-line to the west, in order to complete his education
as an engineer before his meagre capital was exhausted, Drake had enjoyed
little opportunity of acquiring knowledge of London; and those
acquaintances of his who travelled thither with their shiny black bags
every morning, seemed to him to know even less than he did. There were
but two points of view from which the town was regarded in the suburb,
and the inhabitants chose this view according to their sex. To the men
London was a counting-house, and certainly some miles of yellow brick
mansions and flashing glasshouses testified that the view was a
profitable one. To the women it was the alluringly wicked abode of
society, and they held their hands before their faces when they mentioned
it, to hide their yearning. Occasionally they imagined they caught a
glimpse into it, when a minister from one of the states in the Balkan
Peninsula strayed down to shed a tallow-candle lustre over a garden
party. To both these views Drake had listened with the air of a man
listening to an impertinence, and his attitude towards the former view
showed particularly the strength of the peculiar impression which London
made on him, since he always placed the acquisition of a fortune as an
aim before himself.

He thought of London, in fact, as a countryman might, with all a
countryman's sense of its mystery and romance, intensified in him by the
daily sight of its domes and spires. He saw it clothed by the changing
seasons, now ringed in green, now shrouded in white; on summer mornings,
when it lay clearly defined like a finished model and the sun sparkled on
the vanes, set the long lines of windows ablaze in the Houses of
Parliament, and turned the river into a riband of polished steel; or,
again, when the cupola of St. Paul's and the Clock Tower at Westminster
pierced upwards through a level of fog, as though hung in the mid-air; or
when mists, shredded by a south wind, swirled and writhed about the
rooftops until the city itself seemed to take fantastic shapes and melt
to a substance no mo