MR. MARRABLE, DEAR SIR,--The children and me begs to thank you for all your kindness to father. Father he is very greatful himself, but would rather leave it to me to tell you, as he don't like. Mr. Marrable, sir, if you could only see the diff'nce in the children, espec'y little Albert, what was always sickly, since they got good boots and food inside them you would feel well paid for your kindness. I know the money did not come from you, but it was through you we got it. God bless you, sir.--Yours resp'fly, MRS. MARTHA WALSH. _P. S._--Our ninth, which has just come, we are taking the liberty to call by your name. BOOK THREE _SUAVITER IN MODO_ CHAPTER XI SEALED ORDERS On a bright morning in April Hughie emerged from the offices of Messrs. Slocum, Spink, and Slocum, Solicitors, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and made for the Strand. Like most men who have been abroad for a long time, he trod the streets of London with an oddly mingled sensation of familiarity and strangeness. At one moment he felt that he had been living in London for years, at another he felt that he was exploring a new city. The Strand itself, save for the old congested stretch in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, was almost unrecognisable. Gone for ever were the various landmarks of his youth, such as the Old Gaiety and the Lowther Arcade. Holywell Street and Wych Street, with their delectable environs, had vanished like a bad but interesting dream, leaving room for a broad and stately thoroughfare, in the midst of which the churches of St. Mary and St. Clement Danes split the traffic like boulders in a Highland spate, and the Law Courts acquired an unfamiliar prominence. A new fairway of uncanny width and straightness clove its course to Holborn, blocked at its mouth by a dismal patch of excavated territory resembling nothing so much as what Scotsmen term a "free toom," and proclaiming to all and sundry, by means of a gigantic notice-board, that This Site was To Let as a Whole. The traffic had developed too. There were countless motor-buses, which shook the earth and smelt to heaven; and taxicabs, which skipped like rams and quacked like ducks. But after all, though landmarks change their bearings and banks be washed away, the stream flows on unchanged. The people were the same, and Hughie felt comforted. The smell of asphalt was the same, and he felt uplifted. And when he beheld the torrents of traffic that converge on the Wellington Street crossing arrest their courses _seriatim_ and pile themselves up in a manner that would have done credit to the waters of Jordan, all at the bidding of an imperturbable figure in a blue uniform, he felt that he was indeed home once more.