The Embankment stops short at its westward end, in the course of Cheyne Walk, just below the place where the river leaves a little bend which is an inlet, an incident, of the long Reach. Call the curve a gulf, and this is a little bay within it. The bay is a small, forgotten, abiding, unremarked shore, with a great deal of modern London not only below it, but above it, on its further side--that is, between it and the vaguest beginnings of the country. Nevertheless, it is not modern at all. It looks like the overlooked little bits of cottage, tiled cottage-roof, and cottage front-garden, that are to be seen forgotten in the roaring streets of Fulham--true bits of village in the depths of town. But in any case it is to go, even though the gulf is saved. Let us say at once that there may be two intelligible opinions as to the Embankment at Westminster and Charing Cross. There is something due to the worldly dignity of a great city. The distinction of London was once that it was not a great city but a great village. It was a little town, widespread; and until the raising of some of the best of the new buildings on the left bank, there was nothing conspicuously fine to contradict the village character except Somerset House. The great stations and the busy Gothic of the Houses of Parliament were not influential enough for this. Now, however, it is somewhat different. Two buildings at least in the line of new hotels and offices seem good enough to make rules. They are not of the dignity of Somerset House, but they will serve. For a space, then, where they stand, the village-London is done away. And only for a village-London, a London keeping its own distinctive character, would a broken, accidental, muddy shore, with its tidal rhythm of mud and wave, be fit. This left bank at least is, for a space, _grande ville_. We cannot altogether grudge its Embankment. [Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER.] But if there is a mile of London village left--and therefore of the most London-like London--it is at Chelsea. The reason of the County Council's heart, even, ought to confess thus much. And the village-character is in its vitality on the curving foreshore of this long Reach. A great part of the district near is a village of yesterday, and mean enough, but the river-side of wharf and barge and tidal change is a village river-side of long ago. It is lowly enough, not mean at all. It is the scene of business as old as civilisation; man-power and horse-power, and the movement of wind and water, seem to do the greater part of the work among them. It is the counterpart of spade cultivation on the Jersey _coteaux_, though this is all river and that all earth; but both are simple. The chimneys on the right bank are a long way off, the gasworks higher up are out of sight. You can forget the great bridges down stream; and looking towards the light the view is animating.