s
country. The freedom of the subject had been born on this hallowed
spot; here had been thrown down those cruel barriers by which the rich
and powerful penned and confined the poor and humble as cattle or
slaves; by this and because of this, the people's meeting-place, men
like himself had been enabled to aspire and to achieve. He was aware
of a moisture in his eyes and a lump in his throat while he meditated
thus; and then suddenly his eyes grew hot and dry again, and his
larynx opened. His thought had taken a rapid turn from the general to
the particular. It was a pity that an interfering ass like their
member should have the right to come in and out here, record his vote,
and spout his nonsense with the best of them.

The metal tongue of Big Ben startled him, a booming voice that might
have been that of Time itself, telling the tardy sunlight and the
encroaching dusk that it was nine o'clock. Under a lamp-post Dale
brought out his silver watch, and carefully set it.

"I suppose they keep Greenwich," he thought, "same as we do;" and an
apprehensive doubt presented itself. Would his clerk have the sense to
see to it, that the clocks down there were duly wound? Ridgett, of
course, could not be expected to know that they were always wound on
Thursdays.

St. James' followed Westminster in his tour of inspection, and then,
after that amazing street of clubs, he soon found himself in the white
glare, the kaleidoscopic movement, and the concentrated excitement of
Piccadilly Circus. Then he sauntered through Leicester Square and
began to drift northward. The gas torches outside places of
entertainment had arrested his slow progress. One of the music-halls
in the Square appeared to him as iniquitously gorgeous, and he gazed
through the wide entrance at the vestibule hall, and staircase. The
whole thing was as fine as one might have expected inside Buckingham
Palace or the Mansion House--crimson curtains, marble steps, golden
balusters, and flunkeys wearing velvet breeches and silk stockings. It
grieved him momentarily to discover that two giant commissionnaires
were both foreigners. He heard them address each other with a rapid
guttural jabber. "Should 'a' thought there's large-sized men enough in
England, if you troubled to look for 'em."

To this point he had amused himself sufficiently; but each night as
he turned his face toward the Euston Road, his spirits sank and the
same queer mixture of bodily and mental discomf