It is Georgian or Victorian, according to taste. You can people the uneven pavements with ghosts of your own choosing. No matter how many gallants and dames you discover, there are a few later characters whom you expect to meet at every turn. The colonel's wife! Where is she? You look round anxiously. She should be walking stiffly round with her cane, a couple of Sealyhams rolling affectionately at the hem of her tailor-made skirt. The bishop's lady, too, a tall, lined woman in a religious black hat; the dean's daughter, romantic and anæmic and addicted to green velvet; Lady Potts, from "The Hall," in a dog-cart, large, florid, and suspiciously golden; the three hefty unmarriageable daughters of the major-general (retired), with their bicycles; the pretty wife of a junior subaltern--all the stock characters of an English cathedral city or garrison town. Instead, so strange is this rural atmosphere, go London folk, smart women from flats in Curzon Street, and men passing through on their way to their clubs. * * * How did this patch become insulated from the fierce current of London life? I will tell you. They used to hold a fair here every May as far back as Edward I. Then, in 1738, a Mr. Shepherd built a cattle market on the spot. The butchers' shops had theatres on the second storeys, so that the dwarfs and drolls and vagabonds might in fair-time amuse the crowds. In 1750 so many regrettable things happened here that the fair was suppressed as a public scandal. (It must have been very wicked!) So this is the heritage of our Shepherd Market, this concentrated essence of old England set down within sound of the wheels of Mayfair. If you visit it, notice how the old butchers' shops linger on, relics of the Shepherd Market of 1738. I imagine that there is here more prime Welsh mutton to the square yard than in any other street in London. Romantic mutton! London Lovers When I was walking along the Embankment on a path of pale sun, I saw a young man and a young woman leaning over the grey stone watching the river. There were white gulls wheeling, and the river was high; and this man and this woman were very still and intent. When I stood beside them I found they were not looking at the river, they were looking at the Future! Under cover of their leaning arms they were holding hands. They were in the last stage of love, their eyes like fields full of moon-calves. His clothes were Sundayfied and his boots were new and brown--the colour of a retired Indian general. Her hat had been made at home in a hurry. And they were standing there lost in the illimitable wonder of each other. They were not in London. They were in that aerial country on the boundaries of paradise, from which such men and women descend to a small red box in the suburbs and the current price of eggs.