AS pleasing hours as any that I spent in London were connected with the Thames—a murky¹ little stream above London Bridge, compared with such vast bodies as the Hudson and the Mississippi, but utterly² delightful³. I saw it on several occasions,—once in a driving rain off London Bridge, where twenty thousand vehicles were passing in the hour, it was said; once afterward⁴ at night when the boats below were faint, wind-driven lights and the crowd on the bridge black shadows. I followed it in the rain from Blackfriars Bridge, to the giant plant of the General Electric Company at Chelsea one afternoon, and thought of Sir Thomas More, and Henry VIII, who married Anne Boleyn at the Old Church near Battersea Bridge, and wondered what they would think of this modern powerhouse. What a change from Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More to vast, whirling electric dynamos and a London subway system!

 

Another afternoon, bleak⁵ and rainy, I reconnoitered the section lying between Blackfriars Bridge and Tower Bridge and found it very interesting from a human, to say nothing of a river, point of view; I question whether in some ways it is not the most interesting region in London, though it gives only occasional glimpses of the river. London is curious. It is very modern in spots. It is too much like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston; but here between Blackfriars Bridge and the Tower, along Upper and Lower Thames Street, I found something90 that delighted me. It smacked⁶ of Dickens, of Charles II, of Old England, and of a great many forgotten, far-off things which I felt, but could not readily call to mind. It was delicious, this narrow, winding⁷ street, with high walls,—high because the street was so narrow,—and alive with people bobbing along under umbrellas or walking stodgily⁸ in the rain. Lights were burning in all the stores and

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