And yet what an eviction! This glorious old England, with its sweet homes, its innumerable beauties, its convincing happiness of downs and glade and gardens, flowering into clouds of blossoms, its lakes, its gentle streams, its æsthetic softness and dimness, its manifold and opulent charm of landscape, the hurrying and constant kisses of its moist skies, in league with all the graces of the seasons--to cast this aside, and begin again, elsewhere, in regions drear and sterile of all these things; ah! that was too hard! too hard! and, as he had often done, Leacraft covered his face with his hands and sobbed. Amid these fluctuating thoughts and feelings, the hansom swung with vehement oscillations along the streets, in the more deserted parts of London, and brought its occupant in sight of the Bethnal Green Museum, from which a diversion along Old Ford Road and Approach Road, flung him into Victoria Park, the huge playground of the poorer eastern section of the city. He was driven to the eastern part of the immense reservation, and was gratified to find a public meeting in progress, the exact thing he most wished to be present at, and to estimate. In a broad and treeless area of the park, with the grass showing hesitatingly after the long winter, but vivid also in spots, in the strong light of the afternoon, with an atmosphere strangely variant from the traditional, and, to Leacraft, much loved velvety softness and mellowed obscuration of former days, were gathered a multitude of people. They surrounded a speaker, who, on some sort of improvised platform, with a knot of associated leaders, with a swaying body and occasionally outstretched hands, was engaged in a harangue which was received with attention unattended by the slightest demonstration of assent or disapproval. It looked from a short distance almost like a devotional assembly, it seemed so reverently silent, and as Leacraft approached, this impression was partially at least verified, for the speaker’s hands ceased their agitated appeal, the occasional higher cries proceeding from his lips died away, and a song or hymn burst suddenly from the still motionless multitude. It lasted for an instant, perhaps a single verse, and as Leacraft drew near, another man from the platform group stood up, and stepped to the front of the small stand. At that precise moment the cannonading, agreed upon as a signal, announced the starting of the royal cortege, and the sad beginning of the imperial evacuation of England. It was heard with far away reverberations, as it was repeated from other nearer points, and this vagueness, by a congruity of effect with the dull misery weighing on Leacraft’s heart, seemed to give to it a deeper poignancy of grievous import. It produced the impression of an irrevocable doom. As the sounds were heard by the assembled crowds, the speaker lifted his hand and raised his face skyward, as if in supplication, the heads were all