It would throw a light on all life if we could know what were Ralegh's feelings as he left the Tower; if we could know how long the first exhilaration of freedom held him, and when that exhilaration yielded to intense unutterable consciousness of the stress and the pain of life; for he must surely have felt as if he were beginning the whole business of life again, and many moments must have come even to Ralegh when he asked himself, "_Is_ it _good_ enough?" and looked back to the quiet of his room in the Tower with active regret--the room where he had dreamed and worked, had had the satisfaction of a persistent desire, and from which he had watched great ships making their way down the Thames to the sea. The same detail of his old life awaited him, in transacting the manifold business which he knew so well--countless interviews with innumerable men, endowed with the same amount of ignorance, or astuteness, or malice, or knowledge, or good-will. In some ways the world must have appeared to him to have remained very dully the same; but its aspect must have changed amazingly. Different fashions were in vogue; different favourites caught the public eye; new faces showed everywhere. The streets had been widened; many were better paved. They were more crowded with carriages than they were twelve years before. New buildings had arisen, among which the New Exchange, close to Durham House, and the Banqueting House at Whitehall were the most notable. The first thing Ralegh did was to walk round London. In the twentieth century, an active man might, by clever arrangement of train and tube and electric tram, traverse the extent of London in a day without seeing any of the sights, and but few of the streets. Ralegh could see everything in London, poor walker as he was, in three or four hours, less than three hundred years ago. For London clung to the banks of the river which was the main way, and by which watermen thronged at countless landing-stages with innumerable boats and barges. It must have been a strange experience for Ralegh to notice the new fashions of the Court, to pass among men unknown, himself almost unheeded, who had been the great Queen's lover, and to see faces of new favourites, acclaimed at their passing through the streets. For he had become to the people little more than a name and a tradition; he would be recognizable at his window in the Tower, but in the ordinary surroundings of life he would be regarded with surprise rather than recognition. And men who recognized would hesitate to notice his presence, not knowing whether suspicion might not cling to them of treasonable intentions if they appeared too glad at his release.