London at night has begun, of late, so to multiply her lights that they make all her scenery. A search-light suddenly draws the eye up to the chimney-pots (sweetly touched, they too, on the westernmost of their squalid sides) and to the unbroken sky; and then at once the eye travels down its shaft, revealing clouded air; and here a puff of steam from some machine at work on the new underground railway takes colour on its curves. Or the search-light makes the programme of a music-hall to shine black and white upon the wall; anon, an advertisement is written in light, and perpetually among the even progress of the carriage lights flit the lamps of bicycles. And if, from a heart of glowing lights, you look into the streets, you find them so filled with blue air that there is evident blue between you and the houses opposite. [Illustration: NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY.] The street-corner tree has always the golden gas and the blue air; upon it rains a sky that is not seen to darken for rain, and you hear the drops, silent elsewhere, upon its open leaves. CHELSEA REACH The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily continuable. The Houses of Parliament have an air as though you could take them on along the river towards Chelsea without any necessity for stopping. But that very suggestion prompts its own refusal. No man would hold this characteristic to be one that makes for the beauty of a design; what there is of a really fine building never prompted the wish that it were to be prolonged. And although an embanking wall is not the same thing as a building, yet of even an embankment it may be said that the fact that it is already very long is at any rate a poor reason for making it longer. When the thing is not altogether admirable, it would be hard to urge a better reason for making no more of it. This is worth saying in consideration of a recent measure of improvement directed against the last bit left of the Chelsea foreshore. The measure was urged on the plea of uniformity, which obviously has reference to the beauty of the bank. Therefore when the protesters against the change were accused--as doubtless they were--of opposing it for reasons of sentiment, they might well answer that the County Council also has reasons of sentiment. '_Le coeur a ses raisons!_' The feeling for uniformity is a sentiment, like another. While, then, uniformity is one of the 'reasons of the heart' of a County Council, the inhabitants of Cheyne Walk are free to press reasons of their own hearts.