London once a year has a brief spell of youth, during which she is surpassingly beautiful, gay, insolent¹, and very nearly as vivid and riotous² as the tropics. Her gray besooted old masses of architecture are but the background for green parks where swans sail on slowly moving streams; thousands of window boxes, flaunting³ red, white, and yellow; miles of plate-glass windows, whose splendid display, whether torn from the earth, or representing unthinkable toil⁴ at the loom⁵, the rape⁶ of the feathered tribe, or countless⁷ brains no longer laid out in cells but in intricate patterns of lace, hot veldts where the ostrich⁸, quite indifferent to the depletion⁹ of his tail, walks as absurdly as the pupil of Delsarte, slaughter-houses of hideless beasts, compensated¹⁰ in death with silver and gold, the ravishing of greenhouses, and the luscious¹¹ fruits that grow only between earth and glass,—all these wonders lining¹² curved streets and crowded “circuses,” challenge the coldest eye above the tightest purse. And in the fashionable streets during the morning are women as pretty and gay of attire¹³ as the flower beds in the Park, where they display themselves of an afternoon.

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