What changes in London are the things that also change in the life of a man, and nothing more than the relationship of particular spots and particular houses to our own lives. There is perhaps no city in the world where, under the permanence of the general type, there is so perpetual a flow and disturbance of association. It has even become normal to the life of the citizens, and the conception of a fixed home has left them. Here and there--but more and more rarely with every year--you may point out a great house which some wealthy family has chosen to inhabit for some few generations; but fixity of tenure, tradition, family tradition at least, and sacred hereditary things, either these were never proper to London or they have gone; it is this which overspreads a continued knowledge of London with an increasing loneliness and with memories that find no satisfaction or expression, but re-enter the heart of a man and do a hurt to him there. There are so many strange doors that should be familiar doors. Turning sometimes into some street where one has turned for years to find at a very well-known number windows of a certain aspect and little details in the drab exterior of the house, every one of which was as familiar as a smile, one is (by the mere association of years and of a gesture repeated a thousand times) in the act of coming to the steps and of seeking an entry. The whole place is as much one’s friend and as much indicative of one’s friend as would be his clothes or his voice or any other external thing. He is not there, and the house is worse than empty. London grows full of such houses as a man grows older. Most of us have other losses sharper still, which men of other cities know less well, for most of us pass and repass the house where we were born, or where as children we gathered all the strongest impressions of life. It is impossible to believe that other souls are inheriting the effect of those familiar rooms. It is worse than a death; it is a kind of treason.