The clouds were showing heavy and black upon a moonlit sky as I turned on to the Thames Embankment by Hungerford Bridge, so that I shivered extensively. These September nights, at best, do not add much to the pleasures of a promenade. But this night was especially unconducive to philosophic loitering. There was wind, and that constant, dull foreshadowing of rain which is worse than a deluge. There were those hurrying, hump-backed clouds, and their indefinite reflection upon the greasy surface of the Thames. And the clock struck twelve, and a policeman by my elbow spat and swore. And some vessel far up stream gave harrowing expression to its feelings by means of that dismal instrument which is humorously called a syren. Like the mysterious stranger in the story books, I drew my travelling cloak around me, and shuddered at the windy vastness of it all. And then I fell to smiling. For away yonder, in the mirk, figures were moving and bobbing, and, by all the saints that care for vagrants, it seemed to me that their movements suggested mirth. "These must be weird people," thought I to myself, as I went towards them, "who can find anything to laugh at in this place?" As I drew close up to them their figures stood out more clearly against the great wall of the Embankment; and I saw that the prime cause of this apparent joyfulness was a girl—a girl who was very young, and rather graceful. She wore an old straw hat and a heavy shawl, after the manner of her kind, and one end of the shawl was much longer than the other, and was caught up into a bundle beneath her arm. So that I guessed her to be carrying a baby. One of her companions was a middle-aged man of round and rather stupid build. As I came up he was moving slowly from one foot to the other, and wagging his head. He wore a ragged overcoat, which was buttoned to his ears, and he was waving an arm about in a manner which appeared to be admonitory. The group was completed by a second man, younger than the other, and taller. He was holding a hand to his face, which the girl had evidently buffeted. The young fellow was saying something which I could not catch in a plaintive voice, and the girl—jocund creature—was leaning against the wall, swaying and shaking with silent laughter. That mournful syren still jarred upon one’s ears, and set a cog-wheel running up one’s backbone; the dark clouds jostled each other as before, and were reflected in the oily sludge beneath them; the wind blew from every quarter at once, and the fallen leaves that lay upon the footway rustled in it like a shroud. And this girl leaned up against a pillar and shook herself with laughter.