After reaching King’s Cross Alec made his way to a small street lying to the north of Gray’s Inn, where there was a private boarding-house, and there he established himself till he should find suitable lodgings. As soon as he had had a cup of tea he sallied out again into the streets; for the roar of London was in his ears, and he could not keep still. ‘I wish Cameron were going to hunt for diggings with me,’ he said to himself, as his mind flew back to the time when his friend had compelled Mrs. Macpherson to admit him to her house. Then suddenly the sense of loneliness descended upon him, almost like a tangible thing. He was standing at the crossing, close to the Metropolitan Railway Station, where the crowd was thickest. Half mechanically he noted one and another come and go, and vanish in the crowd, like autumn leaves on a swollen river. They came and went, and he was alone. In this great swarm of human creatures none knew his face, not one knew even his name. The air was thick and tainted, heavy with a thousand offensive odours; and the yellow sunshine from the sinking sun seemed to be struggling in vain to teach the dwellers in this unlovely city something of the peace and beauty in the great world beyond. And Alec, looking up, saw its radiance. He saw the rose-colour in the air. He saw a few unconsidered dirty panes of glass, high up in the gable of a warehouse, flashing like gems on the wall of the city that hath no need of the sun--and he remembered that the same sunlight was lighting up the wide moors and the bare slopes of Ben Ime, and playing on the green seaweed and the gray rocks, where none but angel-eyes were looking on. Afterwards Alec came to know London well, for he was never tired of wandering about the streets. He came to know that Cheapside and the Strand were not ‘London,’ nor even Westminster or Piccadilly. He lost himself, over and over again, in labyrinths of small, grimy streets, each twenty feet of which made a separate home. He found that in the East End there were miles and miles of land covered with manufactories, warehouses, and houses of repulsive ugliness filled with hardworking people. He came to the conclusion at last that the one thing in which London was unique was its unsearchableness. In other towns there were half a dozen, perhaps a dozen, important thoroughfares; here they were numberless. And no sooner had he studied one neighbourhood till he knew it very well, than he found another inhabited by people who had totally different habits and modes of life, different interests; speaking, perhaps, a different language.