or Perkins. Amalgamations and joint-stock companies are crushing the life out of our old friends; another generation and there will be no more shopkeepers in London-only shareholders and directors and managers.

Another feature in the shops I seemed to notice as new and spreading. Even the smaller businesses seem shy of being known by personal names. They give themselves titles now-the Far-Famed Cake Company, the Ten Per Cent Wine Stores, the Assembly-Rooms Dining-Rooms. You find the same tendency in such different places as New York and Port Said; but in London it is novel. It means,

presumably, the same thing as the appearance of the branches of large firms-that we do our marketing nowadays not with men, but with names. It is no longer the shopkeeper you deal with--the man you know-but the name; and, that being so, of course you have the highest-sounding names possible. Now Clapham-a suburb of quite a respectable antiquity, which sowed its wild oats of Methodism as long ago as Thackeray's time, and has now settled down into a general-purpose suburb, like the modestest of them. Here, too, the population must have thickened vastly in the few years I have known it. But what arrests me principally is the Common, where, as a boy, I plucked gorse-illegally-and jumped ditches, and even found an occasional red blackberry. Now

O County Council!-now there is a painted iron band-stand, with painted iron chairs stacked round. it, and a municipal refreshment-room, where they sell mineral waters and buns. The poor thingtransplanted child of France or Italy, where out-ofdoor cafés flourish in their native air and soil-is small and dark; nobody seems to be buying anything in it, nor does it seem to wish to sell; plainly it is saying, "I am an orphan, far from my native land." And then all the grass is railed in nowadays, till the paths look like corridors in a prison.

Yet let us be just even to the London County Council. In my youth nobody seemed ever to be taking the least care of Clapham Common; now it is plainly looked after and cared for, and that very sensibly. In the days when you found red blackberries, you hardly found grass for a cricket-pitch; now the bare places are resown by sections and the young turf enclosed, so that the whole place is at least green. Green-that is all you can say for it, and all you can expect in the middle of such a beleaguerment of houses. The cheerless, artificiallooking, green-baize green, too, that grows under a sky which has no colour but only weight-but still green and so far grateful.

Now I came down into Battersea down the gradient and down in the world. Hitherto London

had grown comelier towards its rich centre; now comes a header into poverty. Dingy and hardworking and poor-here was the poor man's suburb, a new phenomenon. Highly honest and respectable, the Queen's Road, with well-built houses, is as clean as anything could be among so many chimneys. It is a poor quarter, but not a slum-the home, not of vice, but of honourable labour. Choking in the reek of the town, seamed with railway viaducts, pitted with goods-stations, Battersea yet commands at least as much respect as pity.

Past the Park-another testimonial to the care and prudence of the London County Council-over the trembling bridge, into Chelsea, where the poor are housed. It is not beautiful, though the trees are green here and there; but the masses of model dwellings, where alleys were, are the sign of a great reform enacted in our lifetime all over London, and

still going on. And now as abruptly as you entered-you quit poor man's London again. Round a corner, in a second, you are out of suburbs and in the centre. Behind you flannel petticoats are drying from the windows. Before you roll the carriages of the Belgravians, under the wing of Buckingham Palace.

London's effects are broad, but melodramatic enough for anybody.

they should be

I made a half

way house of a club, reflecting, with a foolish sense of a great discovery, that the clothes which had been seemly in Balham and offensively rich in Battersea seem a kind of nakedness in St James's Street.

17

III.

FURTHER POINTS IN THE CROSSING OF LONDON.

IN the centre, the real London, along Pall Mall, through Trafalgar Square, along the Strand and Fleet Street, I noticed that I noticed nothing. In the suburbs, whether poor or well-to-do, I found things worth remarking, even when I knew the districts quite well. But the heart of London gave no such suggestions: it was just there to be accepted. These streets are not especially beautiful or supremely important. They are not so elegant as Mayfair, or so imperial as Whitehall, or so rich as the City. Yet, somehow, they are the heart of London. To them and from them sets the full tide of London's blood. Clubs and theatres and newspapers are their chief features-parasitic institutions all, in their way. They are not elements of the city's life, but amenities of it: they reflect rather than constitute London. We do not live there, and most of us do

B