gourd consumes, the man he dies.

Beaumont wrote the lines, legend says; perhaps wrongly, but they have
the Elizabethan life and ring.

If one had to choose a dozen square yards of London to sum up the Surrey
side, where should they be? For me, there could be no choice. One spot
would demand the first, the only place. It would be where Waterloo
Bridge touches the Surrey shore; where you may look south to a Surrey
hill by Sydenham, and north to half the panorama of London, from St.
Paul's to Westminster Abbey. There, on the first few yards of the
bridge, above the little hill which shrinks the wide roadway into a neck
and stops overladen drays like a wall, blows the aura of all London that
crowds south of the river, all Surrey that belongs to the London Thames.
The business of the town and the country mingles with the business of
the river and the sea. An afternoon in December, the month of months to
know London in, is the time to be there. Up stream from the Nore on an
east wind rides the damp of salt and of estuary fogs; about you are the
steam of sweating horses and the pungent clinging scents of malt and
hops and brewing; up on a yellow tide under the arches of the bridge
swings a string of barges, piled with bales of hay. A flock of pigeons
sways and wheels in the sky, drops to the roofs, settles with a clatter,
sails up into the sky again. Black-headed gulls, in their winter suits
of dove-colour and white, walk about the muddy edge of the rising tide,
drift on the stream like torn paper, soar and hang in the wind above the
bridge, peering this way and that for the fish and bread the Londoners
give them; or late in the afternoon wing quiet journeys into unknown
spaces of western light. Beyond the bridge the lights dot orange sparks
in the films and shades of great buildings and the Embankment roadway.
That is pure London, and London, too, is most of the Waterloo Road, with
its new hospital, and the roar of the trains from the junction, and the
old curiosity shops with the foreign names, and the wig-makers, and the
cheap furniture spoiling in the rain. But Surrey is there, too; a shop
that shows cricket bats, and another that has fruit-ladders, and, above
all, the little shops that offer boxes of pansies and delphinium roots
and hyacinth bulbs all the seasons round to Surrey men leaving London
behind them in the evening. Surrey recollects that she is not quite
London in the Waterloo Road; she plays cricket and plant