But among all the London phantasmagoria that had flickered before my sleeping and waking and dozing eyes the hansom cab was, I think, the most constant. I used to hear the horse's bell.... I had never forgotten my first hansom ride. Does any one forget it? My next--my second first hansom ride, so to say--was to be as memorable. I thought about it absurdly. I remembered the sense of comfort with which one settled down into the seat and closed the flaps and then composed oneself to watch London unfold.... But I found the motor cab the master of the streets. The hansom was still there, but not the hansom that I had known. The dashing driver was gone, the knowing fellow with a straw in his mouth, and a coat with large buttons, and a raffish tall hat on the side of his head. The hansom driver to-day is more like the growler driver of the past: a beaten man. I am sorry for him, and so long as I am not in a hurry I will climb into his vehicle as of old--that is, until it disappears, as I suppose it must. And what then? In my youth old hansoms when they died went to Oxford. Where will they go to-day? But, when all is said, the London that one most desired in such an exile as mine was the London of winter. London on a fine November evening at, say, six o'clock, after Christmas has been signalled, when there is an edge on the air and an indigo mist in the streets and the shops are all lighted. The return home to a bright fire under these conditions, with the evening paper or a new book or magazine! It was a simple ideal, but it carried extraordinary comfort and satisfaction with it. Slippers ... I used to meditate on it for hours. What a deal of pleasant undress repose must be missed by the fashionable! How poor an exchange are dress boots for soft slippers, a stall for an arm-chair, and (I myself would add) a play for a book! That reminds me that I must tell you about my first Bemerton purchase, the Chinese Biographical Dictionary. Mr. Bemerton was right: it is a treasure. I only nibbled at it at first, opening at random and reading a life here and there--there are 2,579 lives in it altogether--and I was never disappointed. And then I began to take it seriously, and now I know something of its merits and for awhile am measuring mankind by a Chinese standard.