hed a decisive victory? Hannibal might have rejoiced. He was a very
exceptional man.

But here's a poor creature still playing the clarionet down the street,
on the pretence of giving pleasure worth a penny. Yes, my boy, I know
you're out of work, and that is why you play the "Last Rose of Summer"
and "When other Lips." I am out of work, too, and I can't play anything.
You say you learnt when a boy, and once played in the orchestra at Drury
Lane; but now you've come to wandering about suburban streets, and
having finished "When other Lips," you will quite naturally play "My
Lodging's on the Cold Ground." Only last night I was playing in an
orchestra myself, not a hundred miles (obsolete journalistic tag!)--not
a hundred miles from Drury Lane. It was a grand orchestra, that of ours.
Night by night it played the symphony of the world, and each night a new
symphony was performed, without rehearsal. The drums of our orchestra
were the echoes of thundering wars; the flutes and soft recorders were
the eloquence of an Empire's statesmen; and our 'cellos and violins
wailed with the pity of all mankind. In that vast orchestra I played the
horn that sounds the charge, or with its sharp reveille vexes the ear of
night before the sun is up. Here is your penny, my brother in
affliction. I, too, have once joined in the music of a star, and now
wander the suburban streets.

That leader-writer has not finished yet, but the proofs of the beginning
of his article will be coming down. In an hour or so his work will be
over, and he will pass out into the street exhausted, but happy with the
sense of function fulfilled. Fleet Street is quieter now. The lamps
gleam through the fog, a motor-'bus thunders by, a few late messengers
flit along with the latest telegrams, and some stragglers from the
restaurants come singing past the Temple. For a few moments there is
silence but for the leader-writer's quick footsteps on the pavement. He
is some hours in front of the morning's news, and in a few hours more
half a million people will be reading what he has just written, and will
quote it to each other as their own. How often I have had whole
sentences of my stuff thrown at me as conclusive arguments almost before
the printing ink was dry!

Here I stand, beside a solitary lamp-post upon a suburban acclivity. The
light of the city's existence I think my successor would say, of her
pulsating and palpitating or ebullient existence--is pale upon the