sparrows--restless black dots that haunt the old tree at the corner of
King's Bench Walk--I begin to distinguish a faint green haze in the
branches of the old lime. Yes, there it is green in the branches; and
I'm moved by an impulse--the impulse of Spring is in my feet;
india-rubber seems to have come into the soles of my feet, and I would
see London. It is delightful to walk across Temple Gardens, to
stop--pigeons are sweeping down from the roofs--to call a hansom, and
to notice, as one passes, the sapling behind St. Clement's Danes. The
quality of the green is exquisite on the smoke-black wall. London can
be seen better on Sundays than on week-days; lying back in a hansom,
one is alone with London. London is beautiful in that narrow street,
celebrated for licentious literature. The blue and white sky shows
above a seventeenth-century gable, and a few moments after we are in
Drury Lane. The fine weather has enticed the population out of grim
courts and alleys; skipping-ropes are whirling everywhere. The
children hardly escape being run over. Coster girls sit wrapped in
shawls, contentedly, like rabbits at the edge of a burrow; the men
smoke their pipes in sullen groups, their eyes on the closed doors of
the public house. At the corner of the great theatre a vendor of cheap
ices is rapidly absorbing the few spare pennies of the neighbourhood.
The hansom turns out of the lane into the great thoroughfare, a bright
glow like the sunset fills the roadway, and upon it a triangular block
of masonry and St. Giles's church rise, the spire aloft in the faint
blue and delicate air. Spires are so beautiful that we would fain
believe that they will outlast creeds; religion or no religion we must
have spires, and in town and country--spires showing between trees and
rising out of the city purlieus.

The spring tide is rising; the almond trees are in bloom, that one
growing in an area spreads its Japanese decoration fan-like upon the