sort of horse that ever stood between shafts, is there. Below you as you peer over the side of your 'bus is a magnificent landau; next to it, a coster's barrow; farther on, a doctor's brougham, a tradesman's delivery van, a ramshackle four-wheeler with baggage on the roof and a nervous little woman in black inside, hansoms beyond counting, expresswagons, automobiles gasping, 'buses towering like painted turrets, a four-inhand back from Bushey playing for position with a lorry, and here and there men and women on horseback feeling their way to the front. Wealth, fashion, pleasure, and the infinite gradations of business - all waiting obedient on the 66 man in blue." It looks like the start of some impossible race, the beginnings of a universal "reliability test," open to all comers. At last the arm falls, its owner steps negligently to one side, and the whole cavalcade breaks away with a roar. Then you may learn what city driving can be. There is nothing in all Europe and nothing in America that will begin to compare with this demoniac plunge down Piccadilly.

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But I was forgetting-we are still in King's Road, Chelsea. A mediocre, unlovely, bourgeois street, which even its memories barely redeem; a street sprung from a royal footpath through fields, trodden down by King Charles on his visits to Nell Gwynn. Here, as often in London, the name is all that is left to snatch from the unsuggestive present and conjure with. . . . A turn, and are in the land of substance, redbricked, comfortable Sloane Street, hesitating between shops and houses, but evidently determined that whichever wins it shall be good of its kind. . . . Another, and we round into the gut of Knightsbridge, rising through it, with Rotten Row on the left, to the gray spaciousness of Hyde Park Corner. Here is the one really joyous scene that London holds, a veritable splash of freshness and color on its rusty drab. Looking over the Park railings from your secure height, you see first of all the double stream of carriages

Quick-glancing to the sun;

...

fashionable idlers, flirting their parasols and dresses in exquisite clusters; farther still, the green pastoral witchery of the Park, dissolved in the distance into that indescribably softening blue-gray mist that is the atmospheric note of London. Here are luxury, leisure, bright movement, an infectious glow of brilliancy, in an almost sylvan setting.

Piccadilly seems cold and blatant by contrast as one charges down it. Yet even here, be the sunshine ever so bright, the visitor is crowned in the pearly haze that tones, attenuates, unifies most if not all of London, that haze that has tantalized and defeated how many artists! Even over Piccadilly, even over this the most mundane of all London streets, it throws its saving glamour. Indeed the whole splendid avenue might serve for a studio, not for its values alone, but for the complexity of the types that throng it. It is the quintessence of London, the distillation of all London humanity, to be studied nowhere so narrowly as from a 'bus-top. Perfect du Mauriers in the original approach, pass by, and are left behind, or stand in groups looking from the club windows; Phil Mays in the life swarm beneath one, and characters from Thackeray and Dickens jostle unsuspectingly on the sidewalk. It is like a perennial subscription to Punch. The clubs alone, which never look so thoroughly clubbable as when hastily glanced at from a passing 'bus, will store one's memory with a hundred recognizable types. All England, all the empire, indeed, sooner or later finds its way to Piccadilly. One cannot pass down it without a sight of some glittering, turbaned, alien figure, majestically isolated, majestically unheeded. Regent Street may claim a grander sweep, and by virtue of its shops a more devoted femininity; but it is along Piccadilly that the tide of social London flows brim full.

The night does but seal its supremacy. From seven in the evening till two in the morning London, or all of London that counts, is Piccadilly. Then, like the city for which it stands, it is prodigal of its happiest effects. London is no daylight. city. Sunshine, pageantry, merely betray it into a maze of incongruities, startle without relieving its sooty grayness, its perpetual look of thunder. But see it,

see Piccadilly, at night and from the perspective of a 'bus, when the lamps show orange-yellow through the blue darkness, and the lights of a thousand hansoms come bowling towards you, and you snatch a glimpse of white dresses, whiter arms and necks gleaming in the blackness. London is pictorially the best because practically the worst lit city in the world. That incomparable artist, its atmosphere, makes even the electric globes forgivable, and adds to the street lamps a softening saffron glow that is never so vulgar as to "dance" or "twinkle." They in turn throw over the nightly pleasure - going stream of beauty, riches, gayety, a recoiling mellowness.

The plangent whirlpool of Piccadilly Circus receives us, fretting and moaning with the confluence of five mighty tributaries. It is the terminus and the starting-point of the West End, where the 'buses from all points meet and load and unload and are scrambled for in rushes of feminine virulence. On a wet evening these rushes reach the point of ferocity. The inhumanity of woman to woman, when it is a question of a seat inside or a thirty minutes' battle with the blue drizzle on the roof, is of more than masculine intensity, as, indeed, it has a right to be. Even so, the Circus yields a sort of dreamy exhilaration, a titanic vapor-bath effect. The lights of lamp and shop front with their murky glimmer, the steaming horses, the hopeless swish of the rain, the drivers twinkling in their oilskins, the tops of the 'buses either a dripping desert or huddled beneath a canopy of umbrellas, and below you, at each stopping-place, this Amazonian fight for shelter, swaying round the 'bus in front, your own 'bus, the 'bus behind, muffled, muddied, despairing-one almost has the sense of a rescue at sea.

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whose uniformity one so heartily wearies by daylight, is transmuted in a fog into a presence of immense possibilities, as he glides below you out of shadow, and is gone before you have made up your mind whether you really see him. Even the 'buses looming up beside you take on an immeasurable ghostliness. On such a day, when all the edges are rubbed out and the outlines of things quiver before one's eyes, there have been those who positively mistook the National Gallery for a fine building. But to-day as we see it across the waste of Trafalgar Square it wears the pepper-box squatness that shook Mr. Henry James's pen to mockery. "The finest site in Europe." say Englishmen. The dreariest, say most foreigners. On the whole, one is glad to escape from the need of decision into the fury of the Strand.

From here to the Bank the 'bus is indisputably supreme. Absolutely unsuspected buildings, in the shadow of which one has walked unknowing a thousand times, reveal themselves from the 'bus-top; not a few of Wren's best churches can only be seen from its elevation, and by its help alone can one call up the eighteenth-century picturesqueness of the narrow, tortuous streets. Between Charing Cross and the Mansion House the flood of humanity is too composite, too overwhelming to have character. If Piccadilly is the Court Guide, the Strand is the entire Postoffice Directory. There are, of course, distinctive patches here and there.-round the Law Courts, for instance, and the lower end of Fleet Street,-but to select or summarize or even describe is hopeless. One takes the whole rushing sombre torrent in mass, as something beyond analysis, and too restful to be imperilled by a close scrutiny.

It is not until St. Paul's is past and one nears the Mansion House that the sidewalk throngs become in a way distinguishable, homogeneous. One is conscious of a restrained gait, a weightier aspect, a more measured and graver carriage, befitting men who live at the heart of the world's credit. Here it is rather the roadways that are multitudinous. But if you slip from this down the moneyed air of Lombard Street and