heir anxiety to be consumed; spouting bottles of
ale whose froth alone would have floated the mail steamers pictured on
an adjoining sheet; and forty different decoctions for imparting
strength. Then after a few score yards of invitation to debauch there
came, with characteristic admirable English common sense, a cure for
indigestion, so large that it would have given ease to a mastodon who
had by inadvertence swallowed an elephant. And then there were the calls
to pleasure. Astonishing, the quantity of palaces that offered you
exactly the same entertainment twice over on the same night!
Astonishing, the reliance on number in this matter of amusement!
Authenticated statements that a certain performer had done a certain
thing in a certain way a thousand and one times without interruption
were stuck all over the Upper Richmond Road, apparently in the sure hope
that you would rush to see the thousand and second performance. These
performances were invariably styled original and novel. All the
remainder of free wall space was occupied by philanthropists who were
ready to give away cigarettes at the nominal price of a penny a packet.

Priam Farll never tired of the phantasmagoria of Upper Richmond Road.
The interminable, intermittent vision of food dead and alive, and of
performers performing the same performance from everlasting to
everlasting, and of millions and millions of cigarettes ascending from
the mouths of handsome young men in incense to heaven--this rare vision,
of which in all his wanderings he had never seen the like, had the
singular effect of lulling his soul into a profound content. Not once
did he arrive at the end of the vision. No! when he reached Barnes
Station he could see the vision still stretching on and on; but, filled
to the brim, he would get into an omnibus and return. The omnibus awoke
him to other issues: the omnibus was an antidote. In the omnibus
cleanliness was nigh to godliness. On one pane a soap was extolled, and
on another the exordium, "For this is a true saying and worthy of all
acceptation," was followed by the statement of a religious dogma; while
on another pane was an urgent appeal not to do in the omnibus what you
would not do in a drawing-room. Yes, Priam Farll had seen the world, but
he had never seen a city so incredibly strange, so packed with curious
and rare psychological interest as London. And he regretted that he had
not discovered London earlier in his life-long search af