ly the clustering
masts and spars of ships. I have never seen that place since. Then the
Angel at Islington is absurdly mixed up with the distresses of this day.
I attempted some great detour thence, and found myself with a dumb
irritation returning to the place from another direction. I remember too
a wide street over which passes a thundering railway bridge borne upon
colossal rounded pillars of iron, and carrying in white and blue some
big advertisement, I think of the _Daily Telegraph_. Near there I
thought a crowd was gathered about the victim of some accident, and
thrusting myself among the people with a vague idea of help, discovered
a man selling a remedy for corns. And somewhere about this north region
I discovered I was faint with hunger, and got some bread and cheese and
beer in a gaudily decorated saloon bar with a sanded floor. I resisted
a monstrous impulse to stay in that place and drink myself into
inactivity and stupefaction with beer.

Then for a long time I sat upon an iron seat near some flower beds in a
kind of garden that had the headstones of graves arranged in a row
against a yellow brick wall. The place was flooded with the amber
sunshine of a September afternoon. I shared the seat with a nursemaid in
charge of a perambulator and several scuffling uneasy children, and I
kept repeating to myself: "By now it is all over. The thing is done."

My sense of the enormity of London increased with the twilight, and
began to prevail a little against my intense personal wretchedness. I
remember wastes of building enterprise, interminable vistas of wide dark
streets, with passing trams, and here and there at strategic corners
coruscating groups of shops. And somewhere I came along a narrow street
suddenly upon the distant prospect of a great monstrous absurd place on
a steep hill against the last brightness of the evening sky, a burlesque
block of building with huge truncated pyramids at either corner, that I
have since learnt was the Alexandra Palace. It was so queer and bulky
that it arrested and held my attention, struck on my memory with an
almost dreamlike quality, so that years afterwards I went to Muswell
Hill to see if indeed there really was such a place on earth, or whether
I had had a waking nightmare during my wanderings....

I wandered far that night, very far. Some girl accosted me, a thin-faced
ruined child younger by a year or so than myself. I remembered how I
talked to her, foolish rambl