FLOWER GIRLS 438 THE MEN IN BLUE 447 THE HORSE GUARDS 456 "I confess that I never think of London, which I love, without thinking of that palace which David built for Bathsheba, sitting in hearing of one hundred streams,--streams of thought, of intelligence, of activity. One other thing about London impresses me beyond any other sound I have ever heard, and that is the low, unceasing roar one hears always in the air; it is not a mere accident, like a tempest or a cataract, but it is impressive, because it always indicates human will, and impulse, and conscious movement; and I confess that when I hear it I almost feel as if I were listening to the roaring loom of time."--_Lowell._ HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN LONDON CHAPTER I HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS "London: that great sea whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more, Yet in its depths what treasures!"--_Shelley._ "Citizens of no mean city." The history of London is--as was that of Rome in ancient times--the history of the whole civilised world. For, the comparatively small area of earth on which our city is built has, for the last thousand years at least, been all-important in the story of nations. Its chronicles are already so vast that no ordinary library could hope to contain all of them. And what will the history of London be to the student, say, of the year 3000 A.D., when our present day politics, our feelings, our views, have been "rolled round," once more, in "earth's diurnal force," and assume, at last, their fair and true proportions? In "this northern island, sundered once from all the human race," has for centuries been lit one of the torches that have illumined humanity. Not even Imperial Rome shone with such a lustre; not even the Cæsars in all their purple ruled over such a mighty, such an all-embracing empire. The history of this mighty empire is bound up with the history of London. For, the history of London is that of England; it was the river, our "Father Thames"--her first and most important highway, a "highway of the nations,"--that brought her from the beginning all her fame and all her glory. Partly by geographical position, partly by ever-increasing political freedom, and partly, no doubt, by the efforts of a dominant race, that glory has, through the centuries, been maintained and aggrandised.