As the train drew in through the panorama of chimney-pots, factory roofs and gasometers, it was her face John saw, over the wretchedness of the bewildering city. In the station he awoke to the reality of the things under the girders and glazed roofs. He carried only a bag; his trunk would be forwarded when he found rooms. He stood on the platform hesitating a moment. London frightened him. It was so vast and self-centred, so busy with people who had apparently solved the problem he had to solve. Where should he begin, and how would it all end? For the moment he had one rule, strict economy. He made his way slowly up the incline out of Liverpool Street Station, and asked a policeman the best means of reaching Mariton Street. "Where is it?" he asked the genial fellow whose robust countenance cheered him. "Pimlico! No. 6 bus to Charing Cross, change to 24, that'll take you down to Mariton Street." John thanked him and clambered to the top of the bus. He watched the traffic, human and vehicular, streaming down Bishopsgate. At the Bank, he could not suppress a thrill as he looked on the restless tide surging into the vortex before the Mansion House. St. Paul's, lifting its sun-struck dome into the morning air, pigeon-haunted, floated away behind, and the short descent under the viaduct brought them to Ludgate Circus. There, narrow, mazed with telegraph wires, jammed with buses, cars, lorries, and hurrying humanity, rose Fleet Street. An incommunicable wonder stole in on the boy's heart. Here was the battle ground whereon he would throw down his gauge. The roar in his ears might have been applause, or was it the laughter of ridicule? The gold-lettered sign-boards announced the tributary channels on either hand. Names familiar on the breakfast table; names of power and wonder leapt forth from these insignificant buildings, behind those walls sat the men who held the world in leash. The fall of empires, the death of monarchs, the ruin of men, the fame that sprang upon them; all these things found their historians here. Man-made, this world was hedged round with the divinity of power. Within those drab buildings beat the pulse of Time. Mercury, wing-footed, swept down those narrow stairways, and leapt forth from fourth-storey dwellings of the Olympian "We."