And conceive that its smiling wildness made no contrast with aught that was around. Berkeley Square smiled wildly too. Berkeley Square had no squareness. It was but a green valley that went, uninterrupted by any Piccadilly, into the Green Park. And through the midst of it a clear stream went babbling and meandering, making all manner of queer twists and turns on its off-hand way to the marshlands of Pimlico down yonder. Modern engineers have driven this stream ignominiously underground; but at that time there it still was, visible, playful, fringed with reeds, darted about in by small fishes, licensed to reflect sky. And it had tributaries! The landscape that I speak of, the great rolling landscape that comprised all Mayfair, was everywhere intersected by tiny brooks, whose waters, for what they were worth, sooner or later trickled brightly into that main stream. Here and there, quite fortuitously, in groups or singly, stood willows and silver birches, full of that wistful grace which we regard as peculiarly modern. But not till the landscape reached Hyde Park did trees exert a strong influence over it. Then they exerted a very strong influence indeed. They hemmed the whole thing in. Hyde Park, which was a dense and immemorial forest, did not pause where the Marble Arch is, but swept on to envelop all Paddington and Marylebone and most of Bloomsbury, and then, skirting Soho, over-ran everything from Covent Garden to Fetter Lane, and in a rush southward was brought up sharp only by the edge of the sheer cliffs that banked this part of the Thames. The Thames, wherever it was not thus sharply opposed, was as tyrannous as the very forest. It knew no mercy for the lowly. Westminster, like Pimlico, was a mere swamp, miasmal, malarial, frequented by frogs only, whose croaks, no other sound intervening, made hideous to the ear a district now nobly and forever resonant with the silver voices of choristers and the golden voices of senators. Westminster is firm underfoot nowadays; yet, even so, as you come away from it up the Duke of York’s steps, you feel that you are mounting into a drier, brisker air; and this sensation is powerfully repeated when anon you climb St. James’s Street. Not lower, you feel, not lower than Piccadilly would you have your home. And this, it would seem, was just what the average man felt forty-one thousand years ago. Nature had placed in the steep chalky slopes from the marshes a fair number of commodious caves; but these were almost always vacant. Only on the higher levels did human creatures abound. And scant enough, by our present standards, that abundance was. In all the space which the forest had left free--not merely all Mayfair, remember: all Soho, too, and all that lies between them--the population was hardly more than three hundred souls. So low a figure is hard to grasp. So few people, in a place so teeming now, are almost beneath our notice. Almost, but not quite. What there was of them was not bad.