They separated at Charing Cross, to meet again in the evening at the Army and Navy reception. Routledge repaired to his old lodgings in Bookstalls Road and sat down before his grate-fire in the midst of old trophies and treasures. Bookstalls was a crowded part of London, rushing with many small businesses, and convenient to vast tracts of unbroken undesirability. It was a gorge that boomed continual clamor. Even at night, when the protest from the cobble-stones should have sunk to its stillest, the neighboring fire-department was wont to burst open at intervals like the door of a cuckoo-clock and pour forth tons of clangorous polished metal. Whistles from the far river whipped the smoky air when the small factories were at peace; night-shifts of workmen kept the pavements continually animate. There was an iron-tongued guard in the belfry of Old Timothy’s Church that never let an hour go by without brutally hammering it flat, and then bisecting it; and on Sundays and Saints’ days, the same bell sent a continual crashing through the gorge with a hurting, tangible vibration, like a train in a subway. Bookstalls had been decadent for decades. When grandfathers were little boys it had been a goodly place of residence, but small factories had long been smoking it out. Indeed, it sat in venerable decrepitude by the fires of its shops. Certain _habitués_ lived on, nor noted the progress of decay, more than an old rat perceives the rotting mould sink deeper into his confining walls, or the crumble of his domestic plasters. Routledge in London was one of the _habitués_. The place was associated to him with dim beginnings--a store-room of sentiments and war-relics kept by the year. Before this fire he had written his first views of London for an American newspaper, and here he had brought various reminders of travel. To Bookstalls he returned from his first journey to India--returned with the old brown Mother’s mystic whisperings in his brain, her mystic winds filling the sails of his soul. Gazing at this same grate-fire, tranced as by the heart of crystal, he had sunk into his first meditations, murmuring the star-reaching OM--until the boy within him, crude with Europe, broke the spell in fright, lest his divided bodies join together no more. Those days he had drunk deep of the Vedas; and the Bhagavad Gita was one with him according to his light. Out of these he came to see and feel the great Wheel of Births and Deaths and Re-Births moving true and eternal in the cogs of Karma. And, having once sensed and discovered this, the little problems of the earth’s day and generation are but gentle calisthenics for the mind.