Then there were other nights of maddening pace, when music and wine, voice and laughter harnessed themselves to the chariot of youth and dashed us hither and thither. There were nights of melancholy, of anguish even, nights of failure and solitariness, when the last word seemed to be spoken, and the leaves and the lamps and all the little dear things seemed emptied of their glory. There were the nights of labour: dull nights of stress and struggle, under the hard white lights, the crashing of the presses, and the infuriating buzz of the tape machine. There were nights of.... It is these nights that I pretend to show you in this book, in a little series of cinematographic pictures. If you will come with me, we will slip through the foreign quarters. We will have a bloodthirsty night in the athletic saloons of Bethnal Green. We will have a bitter night in the dock-side saloons. We will have a sickening night in sinister places of no name and no locality, where the proper people do not venture. We will have a glittering night in the Hoxton bars. We will have, too, a night among the sweet lights of the Cockney home, and among pleasant working-class interiors. And we will---- But let us get started. AN ENTERTAINMENT NIGHT ROUND THE HALLS _MUSIC-HALL BALLET_ _Through the sad billowing base of grey and rose, Stung with sharp lamps in its most velvet gloom; Drowsy with smoke, and loud with voice and glass, Where wine-whipped animations pass and pass-- Beauty breaks sudden blossoms all around In happy riot of rhythm, colour, and pose. The radiant hands, the swift, delighted limbs Move as in pools of dream the dancer swims, Holding our bruted sense to fragrance bound._ _Lily and clover and the white May-flowers, And lucid lane afire with honeyed blooms, And songs that time nor tears can ever fade, Hold not the grace for which my heart has prayed. But in this garden of gilt loveliness, Lapped by the muffled pulse of hectic hours, Something in me awoke to happiness; And through the streets of plunging hoof and horn, I walked with Beauty to the dim-starred morn._ AN ENTERTAINMENT NIGHT ROUND THE HALLS