If you cannot so enter London for the first time, when its busy traffic is hushed, and the first pale glow of a spring dawn is in the sky, be heedful that some night you will give up thoughts of your couch to taste that joy. Wander then down Pall Mall, home of magnificent clubs, after the last late reveller has been taken to his cab, past the National Gallery, the Church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields (a wondrous beautiful church by moonlight or first-dawn light), through Trafalgar Square, and along the Strand to Wellington Street. Cross the Thames by Waterloo Bridge, turning a blind eye to the electric signs that are now allowed to disfigure the south river front, and see the great sweep, right and left, of the Thames Embankment, and then look up in the sky to see the dome of St. Paul's afloat there. Recrossing the bridge, go to the left until Westminster Bridge is reached, and look there for the Houses of Parliament and, a little away from the river, the Abbey of Westminster. Then turn into Bird-Cage Walk by the side of St. James's Park and cross that park by the only path open at night, which will take you across the lake by a little footbridge. From the middle of that footbridge, looking towards the Horse Guards, there is, by night, a view as poetic as any that Venice can show: of the still lake fringed with woods, and--apparently rising up from its very marge--the Horse Guards, and the palaces which shelter the officials of the great public departments. [Illustration: DEAN'S YARD, WESTMINSTER] Most of London is beautiful at any hour. All of it, even to the most sordid parts, is beautiful at the fall of evening or the first glance of the morning. And there is always intruding into the commonplace of the twentieth century some touch of ancientry, some hint of romance. I can recall once finding a note of beauty in that least likely of all places, London Dock. It was an autumn dawn so grey and chill that the pungent smell of a cargo of pepper from one of the wharves brought a welcome sense of warmth. I was wandering about aimlessly when, in a dirty little basin of muddy water in the Wapping corner of the docks, I suddenly came upon a white swan swimming with placid disregard of its utter incongruousness there. In the grey morning, in that grey water, surrounded by the murk of industrialism at its ugliest, the white swan was as startling as a ghost. When, as I looked upon it, the air was suddenly pierced by the crisp, urgent note of a bugle calling the _réveillé_, I felt sure for a moment that this was an uneasy dream bringing into the sordid grey of life a thread of white and silver from the days of jousts and pageantry. But no, the swan was real enough; the mystery of the bugle-call was that the docks were under the shadow of the Tower of London, which relieves with its splendidly preserved Norman keep a busy quarter of London from architectural dullness.