We came away finally through long, floreated passages and towering rooms, where I paused to admire the intricate woodwork, the splendid gilding, and the tier upon tier of carven kings and queens in their respective niches. There was for me a flavor of great romance over it all. I could not help thinking that, pointless as it all might be, such joys and glories as we have are thus compounded. Out of the dull blatherings of half-articulate members, the maunderings of dreamers and schemers, come such laws and such policies as best express the moods of the time--of the British or any other empire. I have no great faith in laws, anyhow. They are ill-fitting garments at best, traps and mental catch-poles for the unwary only. But I thought as I came out into the swirling city again, “It is a strange world. These clock-towers and halls will sometime fall into decay. The dome of our own capitol will be rent and broken, and through its ragged interstices will fall the pallor of the moon.” But life does not depend upon parliaments or men. It can get along with windless spaces and such forms and spirits as have not yet been dreamed of in the mind of man. The Thames from Blackfriars Bridge to the Tower Bridge, along Upper and Lower Thames Street, which is on the right bank of the river going up-stream, was my first excursion, though, in making it, I saw little of the river. It is a street that runs parallel with it, and is intersected every fifty or a hundred feet by narrow lanes which lead down to docks at the water’s-edge. The Thames is a murky little stream above London Bridge, compared with such vast bodies as the Hudson and the Mississippi, but utterly delightful. I saw it on several occasions before and after, once in a driving rain off London Bridge, where twenty thousand vehicles were passing in the hour, it was said; once afterward at night when the boats below were faint, wind-driven lights and the crowd on the bridge black shadows. Once I walked along the Embankment from Blackfriars Bridge to Battersea Bridge and beyond to the giant plant of the General Electric Company, a very charming section of London.