At first this perfect irresponsibility in my city of delight was almost too much: I was in danger of another breakdown. Sleep I could not. I roamed London from west to east, from south to north. I drifted wherever the impulse took me. I was intoxicated with humanity--bemused by people. I stood for hours on the bridges watching the tugs and the barges. I stood for hours in Farringdon Street at this barrow and that. I had no method: I boarded buses for the docks, and never got beyond the stalls of Butchers' Row. I set out in the morning for Highgate, and by evening was still in the Charing Cross Road. I accepted invitations to dinner, and what time the entrée was being served I might be seen through the steam of sausage and mashed dining in a small eating-house. I started to pay calls on old friends, and wandered to the National Gallery. I read the advertisements of the best plays, and found myself in the Middlesex. I meditated Hampstead Heath, and instead inhaled invigorating draughts of naphtha in the New Cut. I bought a ticket for Queen's Hall, and allowed a melodrama in the Mile End Road to play fast and loose with my emotions. But I had my disappointments too. It was too often not the London of my dreams. My dreams had taken no account of change. The Piccadilly I had visualised so long and so longingly was the Piccadilly of 1875--now different from this! My Strand was a Strand on which no County Council had wreaked its zeal. One of my favourite haunts as a youth had been Clare Market--that Hogarthian oasis--and Clare Market has passed for ever; and who can lay his hand upon his heart and say that the Charing Cross Road is any real substitute for the street of Holy Well? That that area was insanitary and is better away has nothing to do with it. The true Londoner cares no straw for sanitation. He thrives on ill conditions. I swear to you that through my heaven blow pungent clouds of sulphurous metropolitan smoke--such as we breathed in perfection years ago between Portland Road and King's Cross and between Blackfriars and Charing Cross. Where are they now? The higher slopes of Snowdon are hardly more free from grime than the ladylike highway into which electricity has converted the underground. London's other new means of rapid transit were a disappointment too. We have motor cars in Buenos Ayres, but I was not prepared for such a capture of the streets as I found. For how many nights before I came away did coloured omnibuses in full sail fill my dreams in irresistible onset! That was London. The motor bus has its onset too, but it has none of the old rollick. It comes rigidly towards you, immense and terrifying. It does not sway nor roll. It wears the inflexible, pitiless air of progress. It is Juggernaut. How human and genial was the bus!