But the distances! and the various plexi of streets! and the endless directions in which one could go! Lord! Lord! how they confounded me. It may seem odd to make separate comment on something so thoroughly involved with everything else in a trip of this kind as the streets of London; but nevertheless they contrasted so strangely with those of other cities I have seen that I am forced to comment on them. For one thing, they are seldom straight for any distance and they change their names as frequently and as unexpectedly as a thief. Bond Street speedily becomes Old Bond Street or New Bond Street, according to the direction in which you are going; and I never could see why the Strand should turn into Fleet Street as it went along, and then into Ludgate Hill, and then into Cannon Street. Neither could I understand why Whitechapel Road should change to Mile End Road, but that is neither here nor there. The thing that interested me about London was that it was endless and that there were no high buildings--nothing over four or five stories as a rule--though now and then you actually find eight-and nine-story buildings--and that it was homey and simple and sad in some respects. I remember thinking how gloomy were some of the figures I saw trudging here and there in the smoke-grayed streets and the open park spaces. I never saw such sickly, shabby, run-down-at-the-heels, decayed figures in all my life--figures from which all sap and juice and the freshness of youth and even manhood had long since departed. Men and women they were who seemed to emerge out of gutters and cellars where could be neither light nor freshness nor any sense of hope or care, but only eloquent misery. “Merciful heaven!” I said to myself more than once, “is this the figure of a man?” That is what life does to some of us. It drains us as dry as the sickled wheat stalks and leaves us to blow in wintry winds. Or it poisons us and allows us to fester and decay within our own skins.