nce more as he rumbles: "_Benk--Ooborn
Benk!_" with diaphragmatic intensity.

To know London from the top of a 'bus is no doubt a liberal education,
but it may be questioned whether the tuition is as extensive and
peculiar with a gasoline-driven vehicle as with the old horse-hauled
affairs that took all day to jungle along from the North Pole Inn at
Wormwood Scrubbs to the Mile End Road, or from the Angel at Islington
to Roehampton. Almost before the author has digested a leading article
dealing with the Venezuelan Question the 'bus roars down Sloan Street,
shoots across the Square, and draws up just where a few people are
already collecting by the pit-doors of the Court Theatre for the
evening performance of "Man and Superman." This being the end of a
stage, if the pleasantry may be pardoned, the author descends and
walks onward to his destination, which is a flat down by the River.

There are certain thoroughfares in London which have always avoided
any suspicion of respectable regularity either in their reputation or
their architecture. The dead monotony of Woburn or Eaton Square,
for example, the massive austerity of the Cromwell Road, and the
cliff-like cornices of Victoria Street, are the antithesis of
the extraordinary variety to be found in Park Lane, High Street
Kensington, Maida Vale and Cheyne Walk. This last reveals, between
Blantyre and Tite streets, the whole social order of England and the
most disconcerting divarications of design. In it meet democracy,
plutocracy, and aristocracy, artist and artisan, trade and tradition,
philosophy and philistinism, publicans and publicists, connoisseurs
and confidence men, sin and sincerity. It is not proposed to introduce
the reader to the whole of this goodly company. The Balzac of
Chelsea still tarries in obscurity. By some amazing oversight this
street, which has sheltered more artists and authors than any other
thoroughfare in the world, seems to have evaded their capture. Chelsea
is a cosmos. Cheyne Walk is a world, a world abandoned by genius to
the cheap purveyors of second-hand clap-trap and imitators of original
minds.

Let us go upstairs.

Miss Flaherty is one of those women who appear from time to time in
the newspaper world and who seem to embody in their own personalities
the essential differences between journalism and literature. Their
equipment is trivial and their industry colossal. In a literary sense
they are so prolific that they do not beget;