figure of the London boy it is that has restored to the
landscape the human colour of life. He is allowed to come out of all
his ignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummer
north-west evening, on the borders of the Serpentine. At the stroke of
eight he sheds the slough of nameless colours--all allied to the hues
of dust, soot, and fog, which are the colours the world has chosen for
its boys--and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush
between the grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky. Clothed now with
the sun, he is crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he goes to
bathe, and the reflection of an early moon is under his feet.

So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature. They
are so quickly restored. There seems to be nothing to do, but only a
little thing to undo. It is like the art of Eleonora Duse. The last
and most finished action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is,
as it were, the flicking away of some insignificant thing mistaken for
art by other actors, some little obstacle to the way and liberty of
Nature.

All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot,
and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking
colour of life. You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he
still shouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure vowels and
elastic syllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness,
his brightness, and his glow. Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening
midsummer sun, he gives his colours to his world again.

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where
Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature. It is always to do, by the
happily easy way of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to grow
in the streets--and no streets could ask for a more charming finish
than your green grass. The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless
it is renewed; but the grass renews itself. There is nothing so
remediable as the work of modern man--"a thought which is also," as
Mr. Pecksniff said, "very soothing." And by remediable I mean, of
course, destructible. As the bathing child shuffles off his
garments--they are few, and one brace suffices him--so the land might
always, in reasonable time, shuffle off its yellow brick and purple
slate, and all the things that collect about railway stations. A
single night almost clears the air of London.

But if the colour of life looks so well in the rathe