LONDON [Illustration] LONDON BY G. K. CHESTERTON WITH TEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALVIN LANGDON COBURN [Illustration] LONDON: PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR ALVIN LANGDON COBURN AND EDMUND D. BROOKS & THEIR FRIENDS 1914 LONDON There is an old London story that has never lost its loveliness for me. It was about a stout old lady from the country, who travelled round and round the Underground Railway in a circle, because at each station she tried to get out backwards, and at each station the guard pitched her in again, under the impression that she was trying to get in. It is a beautiful story; doing honour alike to the patience of the female sex and the prompt courtesy of the male; it is a song without words. But there is another and milder version (perhaps we might dare to say a more probable version) of the same story. It describes an aged farmer and his daughter travelling the same sad circle, and failing to alight anywhere, partly because of the _impedimenta_ of country parcels, but partly also because they were almost satisfied with the staring names of the places set up on the Underground Railway. They thought the “Mansion House” was rather a dark place for the Lord Mayor to live in. They could detect no bridges through the twilight of “Westminster Bridge,” nor any promising park in “St. James’ Park Station.” They could only suppose that they were in the crypts of “The Temple”; or buried under the foundations of “The Tower.”